Mount Etna

Mount Etna is more than the backdrop to the Tempesta family’s Sicilian past: its eruptions determine who survives, what the family loses, and why Domenico Tempesta leaves. In his account, the volcano is a recurring historical force, at once devastating and familiar. Its visible dangers remain in his memory even after he has crossed the ocean, shaping his understanding of exile and home.

A landscape of danger and inheritance

Domenico’s narrative presents Mount Etna through the history of his maternal grandparents, Alfio and Maricchia Ciccia, whose livelihood depended on their hazelnut and almond groves. In 1865, lava from the volcano’s western rim destroyed those trees. Four days later, the earth cracked open, killing Alfio and three of his sons. Maricchia, overwhelmed by grief, died by suicide with poison soon afterward. The eruption thus appears not as distant scenery but as the force that breaks apart a household and leaves a child orphaned.

That child, Concettina Tempesta, was the only surviving member of the Ciccia family. She escaped the lava by climbing a cedar tree, but came back down to retrieve a rag doll and severely burned her right hand. She survived; the doll did not. The injury left a lasting scar, and the story of her attempt to rescue the toy was retold throughout her son Domenico’s childhood. Etna’s effects therefore persisted beyond the eruption itself: the mountain remained present in family memory through a visible mark on Concettina’s hand and a story passed to the next generation.

Concettina’s life beneath the volcano

After Maricchia’s death, Concettina was placed with an elderly widow who worked as a seamstress and lacemaker for the village church. The widow taught her lace-making, a craft Concettina later practiced skillfully. Her life also included episodes of screaming and strange dreams; she said she heard moths pleading with her, and sometimes shut herself in a bolted room with the candles extinguished to escape their voices. These details belong to the account of a girl shaped by bereavement as well as by the volcanic disaster that had taken her family and injured her.

In 1874, Concettina married Giacomo Tempesta, a sulphur miner whose work took him from Giuliana to mines in Etna’s foothills. He returned to the village each Saturday. The mountain consequently framed not only a remembered catastrophe but the family’s ordinary circumstances: Giacomo’s livelihood depended on work in the landscape around it, and his absences and returns followed the rhythm of the mining week.

Warning, eruption, and loss

Domenico’s account places his conception within the story of a warning in 1879. One Saturday night, after hearing Etna’s first faint rumblings and hissing, Giacomo ran to the magistrate’s home, took a bell from the man’s cow, and ran through the village ringing it and shouting to wake the residents. The passage recounts the incident as a story repeated by Concettina and other village women, giving the mountain’s activity a place in family lore as well as in public memory.

In March 1898, Etna erupted again. Steam escaped from a crack in the southern rim for three days and nights; after a quiet day, the earth trembled and broke apart. The section of sulphur mine where Giacomo and his son were working collapsed. Giacomo and eleven other miners and young laborers died. Pasquale, who was at the kiln when the shaking began, survived. Domenico’s written response grieves for his father and curses the earth that swallowed him. The disaster repeats the family’s earlier experience of loss, but now it takes the father whose work had supported the household.

Exile and the mountain’s afterlife

During the sea voyage to America, Domenico was tormented by worry about what awaited him. He described Etna as an enemy he could watch, however much he hated the damage it had caused and the lives it had taken. The unknown dangers of the new country seemed harder to face precisely because they were not familiar. In nightmares, he saw flowing lava, splitting earth, and women trapped in fiery trees. He made a private vow never to return to Sicily, finding some comfort in the decision to remain in America for the rest of his life.

The mountain’s narrative force therefore continues after Domenico leaves its slopes. Etna is the specific origin of his family’s bereavements and the landscape against which he defines the fear of migration; it also gives his written history a recurring pattern of disaster, survival, and remembrance. Later generations live in Connecticut, where work and family choices are shaped by other circumstances, including seasonal labor and the shipbuilding economy. Their lives do not repeat Etna’s eruptions, but the history Domenico carries from Sicily remains part of the family record through which those later lives are understood.