Volcanoes, glaciers and a caldera with half a million people living inside it
On 31 July 2026 at 19:46 an earthquake of magnitude 4.7, about three kilometres down, struck the Campi Flegrei west of Naples and was felt in the city, on Ischia and across the Sorrentine peninsula. It is the strongest instrumentally recorded shock of the current bradyseismic crisis, against 4.0 in the 1982-84 episode. The alert level remains yellow, and the ground has been rising for twenty years.
Source: CNR; INGV, 31 July 2026
Between June and August 2026 the INGV documented four eruptive episodes on Etna: ash columns to around seven kilometres, a fissure at 2,700 metres in the Valle del Leone feeding flows 2.9 kilometres long, and nine vents open between 6 and 15 August. Between 7 and 17 August the estimated lava volume was between 5.6 and 7.6 million cubic metres. The flow fronts stopped at around 1,340 metres, on an uninhabited flank.
Source: INGV, 22 August 2026
At the end of summer 2026 the participatory glaciological survey run by the University of Padua measured an average retreat of 23 metres on the Marmolada, three times the previous year, and a loss from 92 to 83 hectares. The western front has pulled back 120 metres in two years. The survey's scientific director gives the glacier roughly ten years.
Source: ANSA, 7 September 2026
The Marsili, in the southern Tyrrhenian between Sicily and the Cilento coast, is about 70 kilometres long and 30 wide. The INGV describes it as the largest active volcano in Europe and the Mediterranean. Its summit lies 508 metres below the surface, it shows persistent hydrothermal and seismic activity, and its last known eruptions fall between roughly 3,000 and 2,100 years ago.
Source: INGV
In July 1831 an eruption pushed an island out of the sea in the Sicilian Channel. Within six weeks it stood more than sixty metres high. France, Britain and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies all claimed it, under three different names. The sea dismantled it in four months. The top of the cone now sits about nine metres underwater.
Source: INGV Vulcani
Loggerhead nests in Italy went from 443 in 2023 to 601 in 2024 and over 700 in 2025, with nesting now documented in Tuscany, Liguria and the Veneto, outside the historic range. In Liguria alone the count went from 5 nests in 2024 to 12 in 2025, across thirteen municipalities. The curve is not a straight line: by August 2026 the national count was back down to around 280 nests.
Source: SNPA / Arpa Liguria
None of this is a reason not to go. It is a reason to understand that the landscape you are looking at is in motion on a human timescale.
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