Trails

Climb in the evening, sit at the viewpoint and watch the volcano work while the village lights fade below: the most memorable excursion you can make from this coast.

From the rim you look into a crater that genuinely smokes, sulphur-yellow fumaroles at your feet and the whole archipelago laid out to the north. You go when the traffic light says so.

Anyone who writes Panarea off as an island of aperitifs has never set foot on the summit trail: from the top you see Basiluzzo, Lisca Bianca, Dattilo and the cone of Stromboli all at once.

The roof of the Aeolians: 962 metres, with fern and chestnut forest accompanying you almost to the summit. The only Aeolian climb you can do in summer without cooking.

Above Acquacalda lies a flow of black, glassy obsidian, still since the Middle Ages. The trail skirts it and climbs to the crater it poured from: you walk on volcanic glass and white pumice.

The outing that rescues a sirocco afternoon: half an hour's walk to a thirty-metre waterfall plunging into a rock pool.

A lake at 1,278 metres ringed by beech forest, Etna as a stage backdrop, horses grazing free and fifteen degrees less than on the coast.

Just over a kilometre climbing from the village of San Gregorio up the hill: until the mid-twentieth century this was the only way into town. Mediterranean scrub, cicadas, and the Aeolians on the horizon.

A mule track along the north-east flank leads to a village whose people left in the 1960s to emigrate. Roofless houses, terraces returned to the maquis, and silence.

There is no trail: there are steps. Thousands of them, in stone, built by hand along the flank of the cone. That's how you climb to 675 metres, the archipelago opening up at every turn.