The Aeolian Islands di Carmelo Cavallaro, Vittorio Famularo, 1995, Ente Provinciale Per Il Turismo Messina

PLOUGHING THROUGH THE AEOLIAN SEA
One proceeds through a confusion of colour, between scenery of incomparable beauty and contrasting character.
Islands of wild aspect and sombre coloured coasts, which fall sheer into the sea, offering visions of horrifying beauty, giving way to islands of soft configuration and with verdant slopes; vast sterile, bleak areas extend alongside fertile, pleasant gardens; rust coloured mountains alternating with those white as snow; vast black beaches like ebany contrasting with light coloured shores; inaccessible and winding coasts follow in antetheses to low and hospitable rivieras; bold shaped islets, vigorously outlined against the sky, rise beside others flat and slightly undulating.
In addition to similar contrasts, characteristic peculiarities render the whole archipelago original and interesting: rocks where Nature has been satisfied to create strange, gigantic human and brutal shapes; perforated rocks resembling bold bridges and rampant arches; dykes which extend like agile spires and obelisks; azure, Parthenopean type grottos; picturesque inlets with quiet recesses: tortuous, narrow valleys with high vertical walls; enormous rock gar dens, cyclopic bulwarks which, falling sheer, offer scenery worthy of the fantastic creations of Doré; areas of sea in ebullition (due to underwater maroles); extensive regions clothed in all the colours of the rainbow (due to the exhalations of underwater fumaroles); rocks with a network of clefts from which boiling water gushes; wild shaped hills issuing lava and projecting lapilli and incandescent scoriae; steep slopes ploughed through by torrents of fire.
He who wanders in the kingdom of Eolo and Vulcano, has the sensation of having fallen, as by enchantment, into a vague land which corrisponds only with the world created by the phantasy of Dante and Ariosto.

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