EN
My first time climbing Mount Etna, I was still in my mom’s 7 months pregnant belly. I was flying above ground, in deep darkness, and then in the stories my parents and Luigi and Pati liked to retell with a laugh.
Pati would tell me: can you imagine, you could have been born there, on the volcano.
August 2022.
25 years old, at the foot of Mount Etna, standing on my own two legs, looking through my own eyes. I catch a glimpse of Luigi waving in the rearview mirror while the off-road bus carries me midway to the top. Getting off the bus, my feet sink into the black matter. A curious feeling — my mom had stopped right here, 2900 meters high.
I start to climb. Slapping wind, running clouds. I’m running too, from crater to crater. Lava stones as far as the eye can see, all the way down to my boots. Then the smell of sulfur, the edge of the pit, the vertigo of being.
500 meters high later. 25 years later. I take a breathe.