The volcano Etna has been on Sicily for more than a million years, longer than human beings have inhabited the Mediterranean. It has been erupting nearly continuously throughout 3500 years of recorded history, since 1500 BCE, and doubtless for long before that. Etna has had hundreds of recorded major eruptions; it looks like another has begun with the eruptions of spring 2001. And like the hundreds of times before, the local people have been responding the ways they always have. Modern technologies are allowing them to respond a bit more effectively, and with a bit less resignation, than before.

Etna is such an important volcano that the ancients made it the home of Vulcan, blacksmith to the gods. Like the personality of Vulcan himself, Etna is always unpredictable, often gloomy and irritated, sometimes dangerously angry, even on rare occasions playful. All of the seafaring peoples of the ancient Mediterranean knew Etna as a steady beacon and landmark, looming near the strategic Strait of Messina at Sicily's eastern tip.

People have always lived near Etna, even upon its sides. The same is true with volcanoes around the world. After all, volcanic ash weathers into rich soil, and the risk of injury or death from an eruption is pretty small. On many volcanoes, you can live your whole life without witnessing an eruption�or if there is one, it won't destroy your part of the mountainside. That's the kind of risk we all accept about the place we live, whether it's prone to earthquakes, hurricanes, sinkholes, or landslides.

The 2001 eruption of Etna made news not only because it was a great spectacle, but because there was human drama as well. The lava engulfed an important skiing and tourism center on the mountain, the Rifugio Sapienza. Nowadays we don't just send prayers to our current gods, as the ancients did�although the archbishop of Sicily did just that in 2001. Today the Italian authorities send bulldozers to throw up barriers to the lava.

But the first successful defense against a volcano was here in Catania, the city of half a million at Etna's foot. In 1669, the Monti Rossi vent on Etna's southern flank began pouring out a river of lava uphill from Catania. The city's existing walls held back the flood for a week. But after part of the wall gave way, the authorities built new walls in the city streets that were effective against the lava's advance.

As a result, laws were enacted to forbid tampering with lava flows. These remained in effect until 1983, when more modern techniques were allowed. So the bulldozers of 2001 are still an experimental technology when it comes to fighting eternal Etna.