Mount Etna

Mount Etna, on the eastern coast of Sicily, is the tallest and most active volcano in Europe, with a documented eruption history stretching back over 2,700 years — among the longest of any volcano on Earth. Its near-constant activity, visible for great distances as a glow at night and a plume of smoke by day, made it a powerful presence in Greek and Roman mythology. The Greeks held that the Cyclopes — one-eyed giants who forged Zeus's thunderbolts — laboured in a workshop beneath the mountain under the god Hephaestus (Vulcan to the Romans), and that the volcano's eruptions were the breath and hammer-blows of their forge.

A separate tradition held that Etna was the prison of Typhon, the monstrous offspring of Gaia and Tartarus who challenged Zeus for supremacy of the cosmos and was, after his defeat, buried beneath the mountain — his struggles to free himself causing the earthquakes and eruptions. The philosopher Empedocles, according to ancient biographical tradition, died by leaping into Etna's crater, either to fake his own ascension to godhood or in despair, leaving behind only one of his sandals as evidence. Etna remains intensely active today: its Southeast Crater has produced dozens of dramatic paroxysmal eruptions since the 2010s, and the mountain is monitored continuously by Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology.