Tourists scrambled to safety as ash plumes hit 6,400 metres.

Mount Etna erupts, sending tourists running for safety

(ABC) -- Tourists have been filmed running from Sicily’s Mount Etna volcano as it spewed out fiery ash on Monday, local time.
The video show tourists running along a path on the flank of the vast volcano with smoke billowing in the background.
Excursions are popular on Etna, which is some 3,300 metres high, with a surface area of 1,200 square kilometres.
The National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) in Italy said that volcanic activity picked up in the early hours of the morning had continued with strombolian explosions.
It reported there was “growing intensity”.
“Over the past few hours, the falling of a little thin ash has been flagged in the Piano Vetore area,” they added.
A video shared on X shows tourists running down the volcano as it suddenly sent columns of volcanic steam and ash in the sky.
Officials at the INGV said a pyroclastic flow - an avalanche of burning ash careening down the slopes at a fast pace and with high density - was “probably produced by a collapse of material from the northern flank of the South-East Crater”.
A red aviation warning was issued by the Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre Toulouse. The warning was later downgraded to orange.
The eruption has not affected the operations at the nearby Catania airport.
The area of danger was confined to the summit of Etna, which was closed to tourists as a precaution, according to Stefano Branca, an INGV official in Catania.
Sicily’s President Renato Schifani said lava flows emitted in the eruption had not passed the natural containment area, “and posed no danger to the population”.
Tremors from the eruption were widely felt in the towns and villages on Mount Etna’s flanks, Italian media reported.

(Latest Update June 4, 2025)