[17th – 21st September 2019]

When approaching an island which is pretty much just a live volcano, with some houses and a few hotels around its base, safety is understandably prominent in one’s thoughts. So it was gratifying to board the hydrofoil from Lipari, and immediately be invited to view the safety presentation on the video screen at the front of the vessel. For the entire trip, the words “Geen Signaal” – no signal, in Dutch – tracked across the screen.

We had already fallen out with our hotel on Stromboli, who advertised a shuttle service, then told us it had stopped in August. So, when we disembarked, we headed for a taxi, which turned out to be basically a golf cart. This poor man’s tuk-tuk hurtled us away from the port, and up through the narrow, winding streets towards the slopes of the volcano. Stromboli’s residential area boasts very narrow alleyways, only a golf cart wide – when you walk up or down the alleys, you have to constantly dive into doorways, crevices etc., to avoid the demonic golf carts.

There appear to be no cars on the island and no streetlights. Travellers, who clearly had researched this sort of thing before arriving, wander about with miner’s lamp type things on their foreheads. We just wander about in the darkness scaring everybody.

The hotel has a huge, and very nice swimming pool. Our room is quirky, and quite large, but with no storage space whatsoever, other than a few coat hangers on a rack above the fridge and safe. No wardrobe, no cabinets, no drawers. My first thought was that perhaps this was a nudist hotel, but sitting on the large expanse of cold blue tiles would be a chilling experience. Not to mention gritty, as every surface gains its thin layer of black volcanic ash.

As we sit by the pool, the volcano towers over the landscape, regularly emitting steam or grey/black smoke, usually accompanied by a not-too-distant thunder-like rumble. As I write this, we have had to retreat indoors from a quite violent thunderstorm with constant thunder and lightning, high winds and lashing rain. Stromboli certainly seems to be the place to see physics in action.

Our hotel told us that there were no restaurants in the residential district we were in, so Fiona got onto Google Maps and found one a mere four minutes’ walk away – some of the best pasta we’d ever had.  Pity I had gone out with no means of payment.  Fiona had to walk back through the pitch-black streets to our hotel to get some money, as I’d definitely have got lost, but no one seemed phased by the delay in paying the bill.

We took a much-anticipated night trip by boat to see the volcano – this did not disappoint!  The lack of cars and streetlights on the island means that, by our 9:00pm departure, there was as close to zero light pollution as you can get.  We were taken, with a very nice and enthusiastic German couple, out in a tiny rib in the pitch black, heading towards the nearest headland.  Our entire field of vision was taken up by the inky black sea, a canopy of the unfathomably 3-D heavens, with stars behind stars in the sort of night sky we hadn’t seen for decades, and the looming dark shape of the volcano. Against the spectacular sky, in one direction, a large moon appeared to be suspended an inch above the horizon.  On the other bow, the outline of Stromboli’s volcano lurked against the starry backdrop.

The closer we approached, the more we could see of the activity within the volcano’s crater above.  There is a constant fizzing orange/red fire within the crater, that looks like a giant brazier, throwing off “sparks”, which are actually molten lava, around 8000 feet up from sea level.  At intervals, the beast emits a spectacular red plume vertically, at our (very rough) guess perhaps a 100 or more feet high above the rim of the crater.  Sometimes this is accompanied by a more diffuse red spray of fire, some of which can be seen tumbling down the top slopes of the mountain. 

These phenomena are sometimes eerily silent, with only the sea washing around the rib for company.  On other occasions, the fiery emission is followed by an ominous thunder rolling out across the calm sea towards the watching craft.

The rib’s skipper was a quiet chap, who seemed happy to sit at anchor whilst we gawped at the sound and light show being played out in front of us.  He mentioned that he had helped evacuate the inhabitants of Ginostra, a village of 50 inhabitants, on the other side of the island, we think during the recent major eruption which tragically claimed the life of an Australian hiker.

The advertised tours we looked at before we left home mentioned the opportunity to view lava flowing down the mountain and into the sea.  It must have been deemed too dangerous to approach that face of the volcano at present, as none of the handful of boats proceeded beyond the headland, and ours was the closest in to shore.

The next night, we booked a table for dinner at the Osservatorio (Observatory).  This involved a short walk to catch the restaurant’s shuttle bus – a minibus that looks like someone has shrunk it in the wash – which does the 15 minute climb up a track which seems narrower than the vehicle, ascending the lower slopes of the volcano.  Trees and bushes intrude into the van through the open widows, and you constantly feel as though you are going to scrape along the wall on one side, or topple down the dimly discernable drop on the other.

Eventually we arrive, to find a large restaurant full of people, with all seats facing upwards towards the crater.  At regular intervals either vertical plumes of orange fire or sprays of lava shoot upwards, and the most spectacular moments for us were when the rivulets of molten lava cascade downwards from the cone at the peak, red against the black mountain and the silvery night sky, in classic volcano style.  Very hard to photograph without decent equipment and a tripod, but totally engrossing to watch, as you consume the excellent food and wine, in a restaurant that refreshingly doesn’t take the opportunity to rip people off due to its unique selling point!

I know I seem to have gone on about the volcano a lot, but I’m 64 and I’ve never seen anything like it in real life – the Osservatorio is undoubtedly our most unique and bizarre dining experience ever.

Before leaving the subject, I have to mention the people who, in pitch black, on treacherous paths, and with only head lamps to light their way, at 10:30pm at night are still winding their way up towards the crater on foot, most apparently without the benefit of a guide.  You can see their little lights dotting upwards, ever closer to the superheated molten rock flowing downwards towards them.  They reminded me of the folk who climb onto the sea wall, to check up close how bad the storm is.  Hopefully they all survived intact, foolhardy though their behaviour looked.

The trip back down was cramped but convivial, as the occupants of the microbus were all drunk.  We suspect even the driver had had a wee bevvy.  He told the six of us crammed into the vehicle that his record maximum load so far was 14 Dutch people, some of whom had had to lie horizontally under the roof.  Undeterred, we decide to repeat the experience the next night, when the volcano’s emissions were less frequent, but more powerful in terms of vertical flumes and lava flows down from the crater. The driver suggested that the “Mountain is happy tonight!”

Stromboli’s other claim to fame is that Ingrid Bergman starred in a 1950 movie made here – appropriately enough entitled “Stromboli”. It was directed by Roberto Rossellini, with whom she (allegedly) lived “in sin” on the island, throughout the making of the movie.

My dozen favourite images from our visit to Stromboli are included in the gallery below.  Click on a thumbnail to see a bigger image.

Image Gallery

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