Caltagirone is a historic hilltop town renowned as Sicily’s ceramic capital and recognised by UNESCO among the Late Baroque Towns of the Val di Noto. Its highlights include the richly tiled Scalinata di Santa Maria del Monte, artisan maiolica workshops, an extensive ceramics museum and elegant Baroque landmarks shaped by the rebuilding after the 1693 earthquake.
On Etna’s northern slope near Randazzo, Grotta del Gelo is a 120-metre lava tube formed during the volcano’s 1614–24 eruption, with a naturally ventilated interior that remains below freezing year-round. Ice stalactites, stalagmites and columns make it what is considered the southernmost glacier in Europe and the northern hemisphere, although its ice mass has been declining since the 1980s.
Mount Etna is one of the world’s most active and iconic volcanoes, rising above Sicily’s eastern coast as the highest mountain on a Mediterranean island. Its almost continuous activity has shaped an exceptional landscape of summit craters, cinder cones, lava flows, lava caves and the Valle de Bove, while providing an unusually long and well-documented record of volcanism.