Sicily - volcanoes - April

[Evenmoretired44]

Has anyone been to Sicily to check out volcanoes with tweens? Any recommendations about where to stay and whether possible to combine with some cultural stuff? Would late April work? Thanks so much.

Yes. April can be fine weather and not too hot. What do you think checking out a volcano is? Just seeing one or climbing one? Etna is active at the moment. Not very safe to go climbing it. Iceland has volcanos too. Plus not sure if trips are operating up Vesuvius right now but Pompeii is a reminder of the destruction they can cause.

We stayed in Taormina a couple of years ago. Easy to do trips to Etna, the Alcantara Gorge etc. Godfather Tour. The greek amphitheatre is amazing. We did a 2 stop trip with Ortigia / Siracusa which is a gorgeous town and also has some greek/roman ruins.

Thank you very much. The idea would be climb it and I thought you could still in some areas. There’s also Stromboli if etna isn’t safe at the moment.

The 2 centre trip sounds great.

wondered about Iceland but the presence of sun, Italian food and Classical ruins in addition to volcanoes make me more keen on Sicily.

Sicilyspot.com do a “jeep” vehicle ascent of Etna. Much easier - it’s 3000m.

Apparently best time to visit Etna is the autumn.

Following as I fancy a volcano

my research tells me that other than Iceland the best place in Europe (in terms of accessibility to the actual crater) is probably Teide on Tenerife.

we are definitely going to go to Pompeii in the next year or two but I don’t think Vesuvius is that easy to get “up”.

There are restrictions as to how high you can go on Etna without an accredited guide - you can't just climb it. If it is active there are restrictions on how high anyone can go. On the trip we went on we were shown volcanic bombes the size of cars that had landed in previous eruptions.
Guided excursions are great, but quite expensive, taking you in the cable car and then in 4wd buses up to the higher zone where qualified geologists tell you all about the volcano. It will be cold up there in April, but warm jackets are provided.
On your own you can get up to the lower zones and the cable car station if you just want a closer look.

I think Teide last erupted in 1909. Etna is active now!

@Clearinguptheclutter Vesuvius is physically easy to walk up and round the crater. There are public buses that run from Pompeii station to the trail entrance and back again. But, like everything else in Italy, they make it logistically as hard as possible for you to do this rather than pay €100pp to a private bus company for the half hour journey - bus information not available at the station, trail tickets with a 10 minute window bookable only online and if you wait until you get to the trail entrance there's often no signal there (although there is one once you're past the office), the majority of the tickets have already gone to touts anyway so even when you've avoided the private buses, you're physically standing at the office and you manage to get data, you end up buying tickets at 10x mark-up from getyourguide. I do love Italy but always come away feeling lightly mugged and having spent many times as much money as I should have done. It's exhausting.

We went to Sicily in late April. Stayed just inland north of Etna. It snowed 2 days, so any Etna roads were closed. Rained another 3 and was blowing a gale and cloudy and freezing for the other 2 days. We couldn’t wait to leave to get back to warmth of London!

@Hortesne
oh golly thanks for that. It does indeed sound like a right pain.

I have been on an Etna tour from Catania it was amazing but its a huge mountain so quite an undertaking if you want to climb it, although the tour around it by car was very impressive. The island of Vulcano, just off Sicily, has a very accessible live volcano that you can climb easily. I did it in April, it was perfect weather, plus there are mud baths.

I've been up Vesuvius, Etna still on the list, I was looking at an overnight stay in one of the refuges on the volcano and then the full day escorted trip to the summit the next day. I think when I was looking the summit trip wasn't running as Etna was very active, and so it has never quite made it to the top of the list yet. Vesuvius is a much easier prospect than Etna, Etna is very rugged and looks like an actual adventure. If you are interested in Vesuvius, transport drops you about 800m from the crater rim. It's an uphill slog from there, but max 20 mins at a steady pace, it wasn't very hardcore, but obviously if you never walk up hills in your every day life it feels like a lot of effort. It was also freezing because it was blowing a gale at the top (early April). I booked national park entry tickets online 2 weeks in advance, took a public bus from Pompeii to the car park at the top of Vesuvius, we found a fairly accurate timetable online but there was also a handwritten timetable at Pompeii station (in Italian), we did Pompeii a couple of days prior to Vesuvius, so felt like we had reliable information for public transport and it worked seemlessly. There were though plenty of people on our bus on the descent who took the bus up without tickets and then couldn't get in, so sat on the bus for an hour and then just went back down. Goes without saying Vesuvius is surrounded by classical ruins too.

I think this is why Teide is a
more attractive prospect! 🤣

If you're really interested in volcanoes, an alternative activity is in Iceland where you can go inside one. If you Google 'Inside the Volcano' you can find the details. It's not far from Reykjavik. You hike across lava fields and are then lowered down to the bottom of a dormant volcano. It's fascinating and the only place in the world where you can do this.

I think April is too early for Etna (snow etc). September might be better.

@TeamGeriatric yes I guess technically there was a "timetable" ie a tiny scrap of paper pinned to the wall with departures written in marker pen but no indication where the bus stop was, even though it was outside the station, and no sign on the stop itself. So they do the absolute bare minimum they have to to run the "official" route. Meanwhile everywhere around were massive signs, instructions, people in uniforms etc herding others towards the touts. We also booked our tickets in advance but it felt like a gamble to do so with a small entry window before we'd even set eyes on the route to get there, before we were in the country. So like I say they don't make it easy for you to just buy a ticket and go to the attraction without going through a third party and that for me is true for everything in Italy which makes it a frustrating place to holiday in, because everything you do there is someone trying to cream a cut for themselves and it's boring and time consuming to deal with. Every now and then someone gets their knuckles rapped - the Coliseum eg was fined after nobody could buy official tickets for an entire summer and instead had to go through getyourguide - but it's otherwise endemic.

Thanks everyone this is brilliant. Lots of food for thought!

OP what did you end up doing?
I stumbled across this as I’m planning a 2 base trip in early-mid April. Wondering re the weather reports if I need to rethink. We will have tweenagers with me who want to see the volcano, so would hate to disappoint them. Does anyone know if the weather is likely really an issue? Also - is eruption still a concern?

Etna erupts quite frequently.

We went to Sicily in September a few years ago and it was very hot. I had originally planned for April/May but DH couldn’t get time off.

We ended up staying in Taormina and Ortigia which were both beautiful. We did an Etna day trip with Etna People which was fantastic. Obviously we went up Etna but also explored a lava tube, had lunch in a vineyard and swam in Alcantara Gorge.

DD was about to study geology and had a thing about volcanoes so I researched the Aeolian Islands. You could stay on Lipari for a few days and then get boat trips to Vulcano and Stromboli. You can get a boat tour to Stromboli at night to see the eruptions. Check the timetables though. Some boat trips seemed to start after Easter / end of April.

We went up vesuvius last year. It isn't as complicated as pp said. We booked tickets for entry on the official site in advance i think only a couple of days before as we wanted to be sure of the weather. We booked a coach which departed from Ercolanium. The key thing to to make sure the ticket time window and the coach match up. You can book vesuvius tickets through the coach company but it was cheaper to book separately. It was 15/20 min walk to the top. Unless you are really really unfit it's fine. You get a great view into the crater which was smouldering when we went and great views across the bay on a clear day.