Mount Etna, Catania’s famous volcano, may be defined in many ways. Likewise, there are numerous words that have given birth to its name.
The name we all know today, already of common usage in Roman times, may derive from the Greek verb “to burn”, or the Arab word “mountain of fire”, or again from an Arab word meaning “the tallest mountain in Sicily”.
Some Sicilians still use the term Mongibello, the union of two words, one Latin and one Arab, which both mean mountain. For certain Catanese, instead, the Etna is simply “the mountain”, one of few in the world where you can ski right over the sea and, sometimes, even over fire.
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