The Volcano and the Tourist

Mount Etna has erupted again, according to Deutsche Welle, halting flights at Catania airport during the peak summer season. The news comes a day after a 29-year-old American tourist died from a lightning strike while hiking on the volcano, as the Guardian reported, in an area that was closed to visitors due to recent volcanic activity. The mountain has made its point, as it has done for millennia: it is not a theme park.

There is a temptation to read these two events as separate misfortunes, one geological and one meteorological. But they are bound together by a single thread. The volcano is a place of beauty and danger, and the danger is part of the beauty. The closed areas, the warning signs, the exclusion zones — these are not bureaucratic obstacles but the mountain's own language, translated into human terms. To ignore them is to misread the landscape.

We do not wish to moralise about the dead. A young man went hiking on a volcano, as many have done before him, and the mountain took him. It is a tragedy, not a lesson. But the eruption that followed, disrupting the travel plans of thousands, is a reminder that the sublime is not a commodity. It cannot be packaged, scheduled, or made safe. It can only be respected.

Sicily has lived with Etna for as long as there have been Sicilians. The volcano is not a visitor attraction but a neighbour, a capricious and powerful one. The rest of Italy, and the world, would do well to remember that. The mountain does not care about our summer holidays. It cares only about its own slow, patient fury.

Perhaps the best we can do is to approach such places with humility, to accept that we are guests on a landscape that does not need us. The flights will resume, the ash will settle, and the tourists will return. But the volcano will remain, as it always has, a monument to the forces that made this country and that could, at any moment, remake it.