01 March 08

Features

Wildside

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Over on the Aeolian island of Vulcano, things are not so much fiery as smelly. From a distance, the island looks like a kid’s drawing of a volcano – a perfect, if ragged, cone-shape, with a top dent like a decapitated boiled egg. And it’s very much eggs that spring to mind the closer you get. With the wind in the wrong direction, the stink of sulphur hits you before you even step off the hydrofoil.

Rain lashes our steep climb to the crater. A skull-andcrossbones sign warns of the danger from inhaling sulphurous gases. But it is the weather that defeats us in the end with its silhouette-obliterating mists, even though spring is considered the perfect season for volcano hikes.

Instead of tantrums and thunder then, we join a decorous sprinkling of brave tourists behind the landing dock, where the famed Laghetto di Fanghi mud baths allow you to bathe in a gloopy yellow soup of sulphurous mud – to emerge, after washing off in the warm, bubbling sea, presumably detoxified, but nevertheless smelling like a chemistry lesson.