«Everything nature has that is great, everything that is pleasant, everything that is terrible, can be compared to Etna, and Etna cannot be compared to anything» wrote the French writer Dominique Vivand in 1788 Denon after having touched the slopes of the volcano like many other young people who at the end of the 700th century began to consider Sicily a fundamental destination of the Grand Tour, an obligatory stage in the life of European offspring, seen as an unmissable opportunity for growth and cultural elevation.
With its 3.340 meters high, Etna is the highest active volcano on the Eurasian Plate, a feature that, together with the rivers of fire that periodically flow from a 570-year-old mountain, has fascinated and continues to fascinate writers, scholars and scientists, prompting UNESCO to include it (in 2013) in the list of assets constituting the World Heritage 'humanity.
On its slopes, in the center of the city of Catania, whose population has a visceral love for what is affectionately called "a muntagna" in dialect, is the headquarters of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology directed by the seismologist Eugenio Privitera. From Piazza Roma, the technicians monitor every breath and every jolt of Etna. A small army made up of engineers, seismologists, volcanologists, geologists, space technicians and meteorologists observes and studies all the evolutions that take place 24 hours a day, especially in the summit districts. An exhausting work of data collection that starts from the surveys of the gases emitted between the slopes of black lava, the first "signal" of the presence of magma.
Then, from time to time, Etna begins to shake, "gets angry" for the people of Catania, puffing kilometers of lava columns. In December 2015, according to the Idgv, 7 km in height were reached, but the "record" still belongs to the 1999 eruption, when masses of magma came out of the volcano's belly and reached a height of 12km.
Every eruption, every gasp, is experienced as a spectacle that nature offers to those lucky enough to be able to witness it. In reality often, beauty is accompanied by fears and discomforts. During the strongest paroxysmal episodes, the rain of ash floods Catania, causing the nearby airport of Fontanarossa to go haywire and causing more than one inconvenience to the citizens.
But it's just these the moments in which the IDGV works more frenetically using the most sophisticated instruments, from video cameras to computer centres, via seismic stations, gps devices, magnetic and gravimetric instruments and infrared sensors. The aim is to collect as much data as possible from the ground and then compare them with those arriving from the sky, given that in 2009 "a satellite observation system" was also created. On Etna, these scientists know almost everything by now and represent a true and proper excellence worldwide. Non-experts will have to "make do" with observing one of nature's most beautiful spectacles with fascination.
