If it was otherwise unchanged, but lost its biggest, highest mountain, Sicily would still be a mountainous island.
Etna, however, is very much higher and larger than all other Sicilian mountains.
It is also singularly recognisable, singularly influential/consequential, and hugely more dynamic than any other Sicilian peak or range.
Across a surprisingly large area – weather permitting, and provided one is not in some other mountains’ valleys – one can be looking over Sicilian countryside and not thinking of Etna at all, only to realise, suddenly, “there it is!”
This post’s photo was taken at 10.58 pm on the first day of October 2023.
We were looking west/southwest – inland – from Savoca, an attractive hilltop village, just a few kilometres in from Sicily’s east coast, and circa 30 minutes north of Taormina.
Most non-Sicilians have never heard of Savoca, but at least hundreds of millions of us have seen it…on a screen.
There really is a Sicilian town called Corleone, but, by the time Francis Ford Coppola filmed The Godfather, the real Corleone had become much too modern, no longer suitably “picturesque”.
Coppola’s “Corleone” was in fact Savoca.
If you look carefully, you can see that there are actual clouds on Etna’s eastern shoulder, but the “cloud” atop Etna is in fact the volcano’s own emission.
It was not Etna that scorched the slope in the photo’s foreground; that hillside was one of many that burned when wildfires raged across much of Sicily in the summer of 2023.