Just before dawn, Mount Etna exploded, a chute of fire hurling molten lava toward the night’s dimming stars, then cascading down as black basalt sand and shards of glassy ash. Residents on Etna’s lower slopes woke to a blanket of silt over their fields and streets.
A few hours later, I was trekking up the volcano — though at a safe distance from the fire-breathing summit — as vapor spewed from the crater.
Etna’s eruptions — including a June blast that collapsed a crater — are perennial but rarely perilous, though caution, gear and a guide are fundamental. They’ve transformed this fiery mountain on Sicily’s east coast into a magnet not only for adventurous hikers, but for wine lovers. Vineyards thrive on the rich pyroclastic soil, alongside restaurants, bars and farm-stays rooted in winemaking culture.
The area I visited lies just above Taormina, but has dodged the resort town’s mass tourism, unleashed by cruise ships and “The White Lotus.” A new Delta flight from New York to Catania, the first direct route from the United States, is poised to boost arrivals.
My own four-day trip was packed with excursions to wineries, trattorias, black-stone mountain towns and the volcano itself. The itinerary works in any season, particularly the temperate autumn months when harvest is underway. (Check with vineyards before visiting in this busy period.)
A Place Unlike Any Other
For Sicily’s ancient Greeks, Etna was the mythical forge of Hephaestus. Much of its landscape bears little resemblance to anyplace else on Earth. Only “pioneer” plants — black pine saplings, Scotch broom, mosses and lichens — pierce the hardened terrain that has been paved by waves of lava; in stretches spared from lava for a few centuries, there are dense forests. “The circle of life,” said Roberto Reina, a guide with Etna Unlimited (hikes from 75 euros, or about $87), who accompanied me on my morning hike.
Later, down the mountainside, I settled in for lunch at Cave Ox (mains from €12), the roadside restaurant opened in 2011 that rendered the owner, Sandro Dibella, a pillar of the wine world, with a cellar of over 1,000 labels. The vintners’ hangout, known as “Da Sandro,” was inspired by Mr. Dibella’s friendship with Frank Cornelissen, the Belgian winemaker who helped revive Etna’s forgotten potential two decades ago.
My table was loaded with wild mushrooms, a farmer’s soup, wood-fired bread and pistachio-crusted pasta. As I dined, Mr. Dibella suggested wineries, all producers of natural wine, which relies on chemical-free farming and additive-free winemaking (apart from, at most, minimal sulfites).
A Future in the Fields
Etna’s wine territory follows the northeastern crescent of the volcano, where centuries-old towns like Milo, Linguaglossa, Randazzo and Castiglione di Sicilia are outposts clustered between swathes of grapevines and olive groves, with the Nebrodi mountains and the Mediterranean beyond.
The following day, in Milo, renowned for its sea-inflected Etna Bianco wines, the basalt sand crunched underfoot as Salvo Foti led me through his vineyards, which also teemed with herbs and fruit trees. Mr. Foti has written several books on Etna and wine, and is one of the few vintners still making wine with a palmento, an ancient Greek contraption for crushing and fermenting grapes. Once central to Etna’s viticulture, the palmento was largely sidelined in 1997 in favor of easy-to-sterilize modern equipment. Mr. Foti never gave it up and remains the steward of this 2,000-year-old method — and he’s fighting to see it reinstated.
In 1994, there were 14 registered vineyards on Etna; today there are 474. “Wine has put Etna back on the map,” said Mr. Foti, whose father emigrated to Switzerland for lack of work. “Everyone took me for a lunatic when I started, but now my children work here — and they don’t have to emigrate.” (Tastings start at €25.)
At the nearby Tre.Mi.La vineyard (tastings from €35; with lunch from €50), I visited another vintner, Gloria Di Paola. “It’s not easy to stay in Sicily,” she said, pouring me her prize-winning Emigrante red. “You have to create something for yourself.”
Ms. Di Paola returned after a stint in Paris, converting her family’s bulk wine vineyard to small-batch, high-caliber production. In Sicily, which remains one of Italy’s least developed regions, previous generations abandoned agriculture for urban jobs; today, small-production winemaking has become a rare foothold for young people.
That unseasonably cool evening, when I arrived at 4 Archi, a waiter placed a copper bucket of burning embers by my feet. The 30-year-old osteria, cheerful and jam-packed with memorabilia, has a menu that spotlights specialties at risk of disappearing, like a local cabbage known as trunzu.
“Dining is full of political possibilities,” said the proprietor, Rosario Grasso. “Restaurants can act as stewards of endangered plants and animals, sustaining culinary traditions, small producers and biodiversity.”
I dug into the deep-fried glory of an arancino stuffed with trunzu, while Mr. Grasso’s daughter, Sara, who oversees the cellar, filled my glass.
A short drive north brought me to my lodging at Etnella, a vineyard with pumice cottages (Etnella Notti Stellate, from €100; tastings from €40) set high on Etna’s seaside slope. The next morning, I gazed down at birds flying over the glimmering Mediterranean.
The owner, Davide Bentivegna, showed me around grapevine plots scattered across the volcano. “To understand wine, you have to experience the land it comes from,” he said, inspecting a bud, Etna’s smoke-wreathed summit looming above.
“Etna is an ally,” Mr. Bentivegna said. “You can make extraordinary wines here working with the earth, not working against it with chemicals.”
Ashes to Aperitivo
The following day, I headed to Linguaglossa — a small, cinematic town of early Baroque churches and black basalt houses with frilly pale-stone window trimmings. Records trace the outpost to at least 1145. Today, it’s the liveliest of Etna’s wine towns.
Linguaglossa has its quiet museums — one ethnographic, another honoring local artists Francesco Messina and Salvatore Incorpora — but the town has been energized by SARP, the Sicily Artist in Residency Program, with artists on extended stays creating works at a hazelnut-storehouse-turned-studio, and a new contemporary gallery.
The residency was established by Palazzo Previtera — a colorfully frescoed family home dating to 1649, now welcoming guests as a whimsical hotel filled with gilt-framed paintings, cast-iron bed frames and other heirlooms, and a pool in its rose-arbored garden (rooms from €150).
In July, Palazzo Previtera opened an ambitious restaurant and natural wine bar. Elsewhere in Linguaglossa, low-key establishments like the Dai Pennisi butchery and Trattoria Linguagrossa keep well-stocked cantinas. Even the Pino Azzurro bakery, open since 1951, hosts aperitivos with Etna’s wines (from €5 a glass) — a convivial hangout for chatting up locals and sampling small-production varieties.
From Linguaglossa, I continued to Tenuta di Fessina, a farm-stay near Castiglione di Sicilia, with romantic, antique-furnished rooms in its refurbished 18th-century main villa, converted barn and bakery outbuilding (from €200 wine tastings; with lunch from €45). My room was tucked above the winery’s original palmento, and faced a sweep of flatland grapevines backed by mountains. Years ago at Fessina, downslope from Etna’s craters, I watched lava burst through the night like fireworks.
‘Drawn Into the Past’
My last destination was Randazzo, another enchanting volcanic-stone town, with medieval arch-lined streets and a 13th-century turret housing an archaeological museum.
“In Sicily, you’re drawn into the past,” said Salvatore Giardina, who runs Vitis, a rustic restaurant with outdoor tables by Randazzo’s arches, an extensive wine list and local ingredients like wild asparagus and artisan sausages from wild-grazing livestock (mains from €18).
For dessert, I headed to Santo Musumeci, renowned for its granitas in imaginative flavors (from €1.50). Granita originated on Etna in the ninth century, when Sicily’s ruling Arabs introduced citrus and sugar cane to the island, and mixed them with the volcano’s snow.
Randazzo is also home to another of Etna’s great clubhouse bars. At Il Buongustaio, the owner, Pippo Calà, has manned the counter for almost 40 years. “This is a place to unwind, to connect, to bring people together,” he said with a tender smile and a glass of Etna Bianco for me. “We don’t want to become a bunch of robots, right?” Cheers to that, Pippo.
A driver he knew ferried me to Dimora Cottanera outside town, a sleek retreat with vineyard-facing windows, a pool and spa (from €175).
The next day, I returned to Randazzo for lunch at San Giorgio e il Drago — a family affair with volcano-grown ingredients and a cantina packed with small-production wines (mains from €10). The matriarch chef — Paola Mannino, 93 — was back, reigning over the kitchen just two days after cataract surgery.
I had also heard that the Circumetnea train, which circumnavigates Etna along a breathtaking route, was running from the Randazzo station. The line, inaugurated in 1898 to carry Etna’s wines to the port, also has a station at Tenuta di Fessina’s doorstep, but no one had seen a train there for months, and accurate information was nowhere to be found. Etna, though flourishing with wineries and hospitality initiatives, “has been abandoned by the state,” Jacopo Maniaci, who directs Fessina, had told me. (Indeed, pockets of Etna’s landscape are marred with trash. Cows graze on public lands to exploit European Union subsidies. Volunteer brigades assist overstretched firefighters combating blazes.)
But as it turned out, though the Circumetnea was indefinitely under construction along the eastern side of the line, it was indeed running west from Randazzo to Paternò, and I was happy to go anywhere it would take me. (tickets €6.50; [email protected]; +39-095-541250).
At the station, only a few locals and one Japanese tour group boarded alongside me. The narrow-track train wound an arc around Etna, as the windows filled with vineyards, oak forests, pistachio trees, citrus groves, lava rock expanses and that fire-breathing cone.
It was a land of sublime beauty and cataclysmic renewal, of state neglect, and an unyielding community closer than most of us to the instability of Earth.
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