Mount Etna caused smoke and ash in a new eruption this week, but Italian authorities said the volcano, one of the most active in the world, posed no danger to nearby villages.
“We have seen worse,” the head of the INGV National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in the nearby city of Catania, Stefano Branca, told Italian news agency AGI.
Calculating that the eruption of the southeastern crater of Mount Etna began on Tuesday afternoon, Branca insisted that the latest explosion of activity “was not at all worrying.”
However, with small stones and ashes raining, the authorities decided to close Catania International Airport.
Emergency authorities said on Twitter that they were closely monitoring the situation in the three villages at the foot of the volcano: Linguaglossa, Fornazzo and Milo.
The images showed a spectacular plume of pink ash over the snow-capped peak, but the cloud had largely dissipated as night fell, while lava flows continued to glow.
At 3,324 meters, Mount Etna is the highest active volcano in Europe and has erupted frequently in the last 500,000 years.