TUSCANY AND UMBRIA
For many people, Tuscany is Italy. One view of a cypress tree, vineyard or stone farm-house and we are entranced, overcome by that longing for the warm south which the Icelanders describe nicely as the ‘need for figs’. Countryside here has a purity that to northern eyes is simply irresistible: enticing forests, sleepy villages, gentle hills, olive groves, winding lanes, terraced slopes, geraniums, orange-tiled roofs, all over-arched by the translucent pearly skies of a thousand Renaissance paintings.

Tuscany is a huge region, however, and far more complex than its beguiling pastoral image would suggest. The arc of the northern Apennines marks its borders to north and east, curving in an embrace around the great Renaissance cities of Florence and Sienna. Within this broad sweep lie all manner of intriguing landscapes. From the high country of the Garfagnana, Mugello and Casentino in the east the wild traveller’s interest sifts westward, skipping over Tuscan heartland – the Chianti hills, the tourist-filled cities, the Sienese badlands – to the Apuan Alps, jagged, marble-veined mountains that belie any notion of soft-centred pastoralism.

ETNA
Ancient Navigators believed Etna to be the highest point on earth. The Arabs called it Jebel, from which derives its alternative name, Mongibello, the ‘mountain of mountains’. Pindar described it as the column that supports the sky. Sicilians call it simply ‘the mountain’. One of the greatest volcanoes in the world – 3,350 metres (10,990 feet) high and over 250 kilometres (150 miles) in circumference – it is probably the single most monumental land-form in the Mediterranean.

For all its majesty, it is a remarkably young volcano, perhaps only 60,000 years old, and it has some unusual characteristics. Here, in a rare configuration, magma wells up directly from the bowels of the earth, funnelled through a central crater which plunges 50 kilometres (30 miles), direct to the level at which continents drift.