© 2014 Diana Belchase

When in Sicily I wake each day to her beauty.  She pokes her head above the clouds, wearing each like pearls in a necklace or a frothy scarf. At sunset she often fumes in silence, clothed in scarlet skies, as irritable and magnificent as a woman made to wait for her date.  In darkness, the mountainside is dotted with diamonds – the tiny lights of towns edging close to the summit.  When angry, lava snakes down her sides in red glowing rivers visible from hundreds of miles away.

Etna is constantly changing, changeable, beautiful, benevolent and powerful.  For most Sicilian women, she’s a role model of how to be completely female.

Etna represents life as well as death. Without her fiery temperament there wouldn’t be fertile soil to grow wonderful Sicilian grapes or other crops.  But more than anything, is the majesty of Etna.

Virgil wrote about Etna in the Aeneid:

With roar of frightful ruin thunders nigh.

© 2014 Diana Belchase

 

Now to the realm of light it lifts a cloud

Of pitch-black, whirling smoke, and fiery dust,

Shooting out globes of flame, with monster tongues

That lick the stars; now huge crags of itself,

Out of the bowels of the mountain torn,

Its maw disgorges, while the molten rock

Rolls screaming skyward; from the nether deep

The fathomless abyss makes ebb and flow.

In Zafferana there is a story about lava threatening the town, and a man setting his table with his best cloth and finest wine before he left and his home was destroyed.  It was a tribute to his beautiful “Mongibello,” Etna – the “Beautiful Mountain.”