Walk the rim of the crater that gave the world the word volcano

The crater sits on top of the cone on Vulcano, a short hydrofoil hop from Lipari: a wide bowl with yellow vents along its rim letting off steam. The whole top of the mountain smells of sulfur.

The way up is about an hour on a steep path of loose ash, taken in the cool of the morning, with the harbor dropping away below and Lipari across the water. The smell is strong at first. By the top it has stopped registering.

On the rim the path runs along the edge of the bowl, the steam on one side and the sea on the other. Afterward the island has a black sand beach on the far side of the isthmus, and a mud pool in the seasons it is open.

The Romans believed the island was the chimney of Vulcan's forge and named it after him, and the word volcano, in English and several other European languages, comes from that name. The crater last erupted from August 1888 to March 1890, with explosions Giuseppe Mercalli described as sounding like cannon fire, and the term Vulcanian eruption comes from his account of it.