Stromboli Tours by Night and the Sciara del Fuoco

Three bands, and they are worth memorising because they are enforced. You can walk to roughly 290 metres, at Punta Labronzo, on your own and for nothing. Between 290 and 400 metres you must be with an authorised guide. Above 400 metres nobody goes, and the fines start above 500 EUR.

The craters that produce the explosions are at about 700 metres. So they are three hundred metres above the line, and no commercial product can take you to them. This matters because listings still circulate with titles promising a trek to the craters of Stromboli, and whatever those tours are doing, it is not that. The 30 EUR walk sold here is correctly named for what it is: a climb to the viewpoint over the Sciara del Fuoco, which looks onto the slope the material runs down rather than into the vents themselves.

The rules are not bureaucratic caution. On 3 July 2019 a paroxysmal explosion, far larger than the routine ones, killed a walker on the island, and a second paroxysm followed at the end of that August. Stromboli's ordinary behaviour is metronomic and its exceptional behaviour arrives without a useful warning, which is precisely the combination that makes a height limit the only workable rule.

Three of the five listings here depart from Tropea, in Calabria, which is on the mainland and not in the Aeolian Islands at all. They are run by the same operator, on fast boats, and they are the best-reviewed products on this page after the walk.

If you are already on the Calabrian coast this is excellent: you get to Stromboli without ever staying in the archipelago, and you sleep in your own bed. If you have booked a hotel on Lipari because you assumed the boats went from there, it is a three-hour transfer in the wrong direction. Check the departure point before you book the accommodation, not after.

The remaining two start in the islands: the 30 EUR sunset walk, which meets on Stromboli itself two hours before sunset, and a 100 EUR boat day that takes in Panarea on the way, with swimming stops, which is a different sort of outing altogether.

Look at the three Tropea listings. Same operator, same boats, same crew. The two daytime trips carry 4.7. The one sold as Stromboli by night carries 4.5, and the gap is not an accident.

A daytime crossing sells you islands, coastline and swimming, and it delivers those whatever the volcano is doing. The night trip sells you an eruption. Stromboli obliges most of the time, but on a hazy evening, or when the activity has quietened for a few hours, or when the swell keeps the boat further out than the skipper would like, you get steam lit orange from below and a long ride home. Nobody has cheated you. The product simply has a variable at the centre of it that the operator does not control, and a two-star review from somebody who saw nothing is the cost of selling it.

Buy the night boat expecting the volcano to be the second best thing about the evening, and it will be. Buy it expecting fireworks on demand and you are gambling with a 65 EUR stake.

Somewhere in every Sicilian catalogue there is a day trip to Stromboli from the east coast, usually from Taormina. The worst-rated product on this entire site is one of them: 3.63 stars from 242 reviews, and the reason is arithmetic rather than incompetence.

Taormina to Stromboli and back is thirteen or fourteen hours, of which the overwhelming majority is spent moving. You board in the afternoon, you sail, you look at a volcano for perhaps forty minutes in the dark, you sail back, and you reach your hotel somewhere after two in the morning. The operators are not hiding this; it is in the itineraries. People book it anyway because it appears on a list of things to do from Taormina, and then they rate what they actually got.

If Stromboli is what you want, get closer to it first. From Tropea the same evening is an outing. From the islands themselves it is a walk up a hill before dinner.

Small, black and steep. Two settlements: San Vincenzo and Scari on the north-east, where the boats come in and where everything happens, and Ginostra on the south-west, which has no roads, a harbour that takes one small boat at a time, and a few dozen residents. Getting to Ginostra is the entire point of Ginostra.

A kilometre offshore stands Strombolicchio, a sheer stack of rock with a lighthouse on top, which is the eroded plug of a vent far older than the cone beside it. It is the oldest thing you will see all day and it looks it.

The season runs April to October and there is no useful argument for coming outside it, because the boats largely stop and the crossings that do run get cancelled by the sea. Within the season, September and early October give you the same volcano with an earlier sunset, which shortens an evening trip by well over an hour. The Aeolian Islands page has the month-by-month comparison against Vulcano.