Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, covering 25,711 km² off the toe of Italy, and its landscape runs downhill from one volcano. Mount Etna on the east coast stands about 3,403 m high (as measured in September 2024) and is one of the most active volcanoes on Earth. West of it, the Madonie, Nebrodi and Peloritani ranges line the north coast at 1,300 to 2,000 m; the interior is a rolling upland of wheat hills around Enna; the Plain of Catania is the island's largest lowland; and a ring of small volcanic and limestone archipelagos, the Aeolian and Egadi islands among them, lies offshore. The island is separated from Calabria by the Strait of Messina, only about 3 km wide at its narrowest, and has over 4.7 million inhabitants, so it is the most populous Mediterranean island as well as the biggest.
Mount Etna: 3,403 Metres of Active Volcano
Everything in eastern Sicily is measured against Etna. The volcano covers about 1,190 km² with a base circumference of 140 km, and it stands roughly two and a half times the height of Vesuvius, making it by far the largest of Italy's active volcanoes and the highest peak in Italy south of the Alps. Its height changes with its own eruptions: in 2021 the Southeast Crater reached 3,357 m and was the summit, until eruptions in the summer of 2024 built up the Voragine crater to the current figure. Etna sits above the convergent margin where the African Plate meets the Eurasian Plate, which also explains the earthquakes that shape the rest of this story.
Etna is almost constantly active. Its summit carries five distinct craters, the Northeast Crater, the Voragine, the Bocca Nuova and two in the Southeast Crater Complex, while its flanks are pocked with more than 300 vents. Summit eruptions can be spectacular but rarely threaten towns; flank eruptions are the dangerous ones. The most destructive eruption since 122 BCE began on 11 March 1669. It destroyed at least ten villages on the southern slope and reached the walls of Catania on 15 April, where the lava was largely diverted into the sea, filling the city's harbour. Much earlier, a violent eruption in 122 BCE collapsed roofs in Catania, and the Roman government excused the city from taxes for ten years. On the eastern flank, the huge horseshoe-shaped Valle del Bove records a catastrophic collapse of the mountainside, dated by research published in 2006 to around 8,000 years ago.
The same eruptions make the mountain's lower slopes some of the most fertile ground in Sicily, covered with vineyards and orchards. The United Nations named Etna a Decade Volcano because of its activity and the large population around it, and UNESCO added it to the World Heritage List in June 2013. In Arabic it is called Jabal al-Nār, "the Mountain of Fire", and its Sicilian and Italian names, Muncibbeḍḍu and Mongibello, are generally traced to the Arabic word for mountain; our Mount Etna guide covers the volcano's craters and recent eruptions in more detail.
The Sicilian Apennines: Madonie, Nebrodi and Peloritani
Below Etna, the next tier of Sicilian relief is a chain of mountains along the north coast that geologists treat as a continuation of the Apennines of mainland Italy. It has three parts. Furthest east, the Peloritani rise to about 1,300 m behind Messina and face Calabria across the strait. In the middle, the Nebrodi run along the Tyrrhenian coast with several peaks above 1,500 m; their highest is Monte Soro at 1,847 m. The rivers Alcantara and Simeto separate them from Etna to the south. The Nebrodi are mostly sandstone and clay, cloaked in cork oak on the lower slopes and oak and beech higher up, and on 4 August 1993 about 857 km² of them became the Parco dei Nebrodi, one of the largest protected areas in Sicily.
The Madonie, in the province of Palermo, are the highest of the three and carry the highest summits on the island after Etna: Pizzo Carbonara at 1,979 m and Pizzo Antenna at 1,977 m. Pizzo Carbonara is a limestone massif whose rainwater re-emerges at Cefalù on the coast, and the range holds rare endemic plants, the best known being the Sicilian fir, Abies nebrodensis, which survives in the wild only here, down to just 27 mature trees and listed as critically endangered since 2017. The Madonie Regional Natural Park has protected the range since 1989. Towns such as Troina, Nicosia and Mistretta sit high in the Nebrodi to the east, among some of the most remote upland country on the island.
Enna and the Sulphur Hills of the Interior
South of the mountains, the heart of Sicily is a broad, hilly upland, intensively farmed wherever the slopes allow and pale gold with wheat stubble in summer. Its natural centre is Enna, perched at 931 m on a flat-topped crag; it is the highest provincial capital in Italy and is nicknamed the "navel" of Sicily. Cicero described it as lying within a day's journey of all three coasts. Nearby, Lake Pergusa sits at about 670 m in a basin of the Erean Mountains and is an important stop for migrating birds.
Beneath these hills lies the mineral that once made the interior wealthy. Through the nineteenth century the mines of the Enna and Caltanissetta districts were part of a leading sulphur-producing area, and output declined from the 1950s onwards. The interior's rivers are short and seasonal. The Salso, or Imera Meridionale, rises in the Madonie and crosses Enna and Caltanissetta provinces to the Gulf of Gela at Licata. It is a typical Sicilian torrent, with violent floods between November and February and an almost dry bed in summer.
The interior is also where Sicily's long line of rulers left their mark on the map. The name Sicily comes from the Sicels, the Iron Age people of the east; the Greeks called the island Trinacria, "having three headlands", after its triangular shape. By around 750 BC there were three Phoenician and about twelve Greek colonies on the coasts, and Greeks and Carthaginians fought the Sicilian Wars from 580 to 265 BC before Rome took the island as its province of Sicilia in 241 BC. Vandals, Ostrogoths, Byzantines and the Emirate of Sicily followed; the Normans created the County of Sicily in 1071 and the Kingdom of Sicily in 1130. After the Sicilian Vespers revolt of 1282 the island passed to the Crown of Aragon and later Spain, briefly to Savoy and the Habsburgs between 1713 and 1735, into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1816, and to united Italy after Garibaldi's expedition in 1860. Since 15 May 1946 it has been an autonomous region.
The Plain of Catania and the Hyblaean Plateau
The lowest ground on the island lies east of the interior, between Etna and the Ionian Sea. The Plain of Catania is Sicily's largest and most important plain, bounded by Etna and the Nebrodi to the north, the Erean and Hyblaean mountains to the southwest, and the sea to the east. It is drained by the Simeto, about 113 km long, which rises near Bronte in the Nebrodi, cuts a canyon through Etna's lava, and has the largest watershed on the island at about 4,029 km². Etna's fertile volcanic soils support extensive farming across the plain, and vineyards and orchards continue north onto the volcano's lower slopes.
South of the plain rise the Hyblaean Mountains, reaching 986 m at Monte Lauro, the core of the historic Val di Noto in the island's southeastern third. This is earthquake country. On 11 January 1693 an earthquake estimated at magnitude 7.4, the most powerful in recorded Italian history, destroyed at least 70 towns and killed about 60,000 people. Many towns, including Noto and Grammichele, were rebuilt on new sites in the baroque style that now defines the region. At the other end of the east coast, the Strait of Messina was the epicentre of the magnitude 7.1 earthquake of 28 December 1908, which nearly destroyed Messina and Reggio Calabria and killed around 120,000 people, the deadliest earthquake in European history. The strait itself is 3.1 km wide between Torre Faro and Villa San Giovanni and about 250 m deep at most.
Aeolian, Egadi and the Islands Offshore
The lowest step of all is the sea, and Sicily's autonomous region extends well beyond its main coast of about 1,484 km. Adding the outlying islands raises its area from 25,711 km² to 27,708 km². The most dramatic are the seven inhabited Aeolian Islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea, 30 to 80 km off the north coast: Lipari, the largest at 37.5 km², then Salina, Vulcano, Stromboli, Filicudi, Alicudi and Panarea. They are the tops of volcanoes rising from the floor of the Tyrrhenian Basin, and Salina's Monte Fossa delle Felci, at 962 m, is their highest point. UNESCO listed them as a World Heritage Site in 2000 as an outstanding record of volcanic island-building.
Stromboli is the restless one. Its cone rises 926 m above sea level and over 2,700 m above the sea floor, and it has been erupting almost continuously for thousands of years, throwing out glowing volcanic bombs at intervals of minutes to hours, which earned it the nickname "Lighthouse of the Mediterranean". Its last seriously deadly eruption, on 11 September 1930, killed six people. Vulcano, the island closest to Sicily, and Lipari are also volcanically active, although Lipari is usually dormant. Our comparison of Etna and Stromboli sets the two volcanoes side by side.
Off the northwest tip, near Trapani and Marsala, lie the Egadi (Aegadian) Islands, five small mountainous islands totalling about 37 km²: Favignana, the largest, Levanzo and Marettimo, plus the islets of Formica and Maraone. Their waters saw the Battle of the Aegates in 241 BC, where Rome's fleet defeated Carthage and ended the First Punic War, and Favignana long held Sicily's largest tuna fishery. Further out, the region includes Ustica to the north, the dormant volcanic island of Pantelleria and Lampedusa to the southwest, while the submarine volcano Ferdinandea, between Pantelleria and the coast of Agrigento, rose above the sea as a short-lived island for six months after erupting in July 1831.