Page 319 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

station, from where the site is a 5min walk

The Zona Archeologica is spread over the two hills of San Mauro and Metapiccola.

The first of these is the more interesting, holding the ancient town’s acropolis and the
substantial remains of a vast necropolis nearby. You’ll see the pincer-style south gate
immediately, part of a well-conserved system of fortifications that surrounded the
town. Together, the hills make a good couple of hours’ rambling, while a dirt road to
the side of the main entrance climbs around the perimeter fence to allow views over
the whole site and down to Lentini in the valley below.

ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE: LENTINI

By train Most trains between Catania and Siracusa stop at Lentini.

By bus Buses from Catania run to Lentini approximately half-hourly.

EATING

Navarria Via Conte Alaimo 8 095 941 045. For a snack in Lentini, seek out this
fabulous pasticceria (anyone can point the way), where pastries and granitas are to
die for. Tues–Sun 7am–9.30pm.

< Back to Catania, Etna and around

Mount Etna

One of the world’s largest volcanoes, Mount Etna (3323m) dominates much of
Sicily’s eastern landscape, its smoking summit an omnipresent feature for travellers in
the area. The main crater is gradually becoming more explosive and more dangerous,
with spectacular eruptions in 2001 and 2002 far eclipsing those of the preceding
decade. Despite the risk, the volcano remains a remarkable draw, though the
unpredictability of eruptions – they may be expected, but cannot be pinpointed to a

precise time – means that it’s often impossible to get close to the main crater.

Etna was just one of the places that the Greeks thought to be the forge of Vulcan, a
fitting description of the blustering and sparking from the main crater. The philosopher
Empedocles studied the volcano closely, living in an observatory near the summit.
This terrifying existence was dramatized by Matthew Arnold in his Empedocles on
Etna:

Alone! –

On this charr’d, blacken’d melancholy waste,
Crown’d by the awful peak, Etna’s great mouth.

Certainly, it all proved too much for Empedocles, who in 433 BC jumped into the