Aeolian Islands Tours: Stromboli, Vulcano and Lipari

This is the thing nobody disambiguates, and it decides whether your day works. Both islands are active, both are managed, and the management could hardly be less alike.

Stromboli restricts you by height. You may walk freely to about 290 metres, at Punta Labronzo. Between 290 and 400 metres you must be with an authorised guide. Above 400 metres nobody goes at all, and the fines run past 500 EUR. The active craters sit at roughly 700 metres, so they are not reachable on any commercial product, whatever a title says. If you see a listing offering a trek to the craters of Stromboli, it cannot be doing what it says, because the craters are three hundred metres above the legal ceiling.

Vulcano restricts you by clock. There is no height limit, no compulsory guide and no ticket to buy. What there is instead is a municipal ordinance setting the hours of the crater path, and an automatic traffic light at the trailhead that responds to wind direction: red, or switched off entirely, means the path is closed. It closes because of what the fumaroles are venting and where the wind is putting it, which is also why the ordinance prescribes an FFP2 or FFP3 mask.

It is worth stating on its own, because it is the single most useful thing on this page and it is in no English-language listing anywhere. Between 1 April and 20 October the crater path on Vulcano is open from half past six until half past ten in the morning, and again from four in the afternoon until half past seven. It is closed from 10.30 to 16.00, which is precisely the window in which a day visitor off a hydrofoil is on the island.

So the standard Aeolian day trip, over on the morning boat and back on the evening one, lands you at Porto di Levante with the path shut. If the Gran Cratere is why you are going, you either sleep on the island, or you take the first crossing of the day and walk up immediately, or you accept that you are coming for the sea and the fumaroles at the shore instead. Those are all reasonable days. Discovering the choice at the trailhead is not.

Milazzo, on the north coast of Sicily, is the usual way in and the shortest crossing, with hydrofoils running to Vulcano and Lipari and onward through the chain. In summer there are also services from Messina, Palermo and Naples, which are longer and fewer.

Then there is the route most people do not expect. A good share of the Stromboli evening boats leave from Tropea, in Calabria, on the mainland, not from the islands at all. Three of the five Stromboli listings on this site start there. That is excellent news if you are staying on the Calabrian coast and a three-hour transfer if you are not, and it is the sort of detail that decides which hotel you book rather than which tour.

One cost that catches people out is the Lipari landing fee, five euros a head in cash at the quay before you board, which several operators state plainly in their own descriptions. It is covered on the Italy page above; the practical point is simply that nobody carries cash any more and the machine at the port has a queue.

In winter the sea decides everything. Hydrofoils are cancelled at a few days' notice when the north wind is up, and a cancelled crossing in an archipelago is not a delay, it is a different holiday. Between November and March most of what is on this page does not run.

Lipari is the largest and the one with a town, a museum worth an hour and the pumice quarries on the north-east coast whose white scars are visible from the sea. Quarrying stopped in the 2000s, partly because of the World Heritage listing. The island's last eruption, around the thirteenth century, left the Rocche Rosse obsidian flow, a black glass wall running down to the water, and obsidian from here was traded across the Mediterranean in the Neolithic, which makes Lipari one of the earliest export economies in Europe.

Vulcano is the nearest to Sicily and the one with the smell. Stromboli is the one that performs. Salina is the green one, with the archipelago's fresh water, its Malvasia and its capers, and it holds one listing here, a half-day tour of the villages at 105 EUR. Panarea is small, expensive and appears mostly as a stop on somebody else's boat. Filicudi and Alicudi have nothing on this site at all, which is a fair reflection of how little runs to them: Alicudi has no cars and about a hundred residents, and getting there is the point of going.

The only listing that covers the whole chain is a week on a yacht with a skipper and an assistant at 989 EUR, which is the honest way to see all seven and is a different kind of holiday from everything else here.

Stromboli's explosions are visible by day as puffs of grey. They are worth crossing a sea for only after dark, which means the trip has to wait for sunset, and sunset moves by an hour and a half between the solstice and the end of September.

In late June the sun goes down after half past eight and a boat that idles off the Sciara until the show is worth watching gets you back to the quay somewhere near midnight. In late September the same trip starts and finishes an hour and a half earlier. The volcano is doing the same thing in both cases. The difference is entirely in how much of your night it takes, and it is the strongest argument for coming in September rather than July.