If you’re lucky enough in your lifetime to do so, you should climb a volcano. If you’re really lucky, you should do so when it is (mildly) erupting, so that you can witness one of nature’s most awesome spectacles at close quarters. And if you’re a little foolhardy and a lot lucky, you might find yourself on top of a volcano during a serious eruption, which, when you think about the volatile and violent grandeur of such an event, will leave you feeling grateful that the whims of nature let you live to see another day.

Last spring’s eruption of Mount Etna, which routed a party of BBC journalists and tourists with bombs of red-hot lava (their panicked flight recorded on film and dutifully fire-hosed on the internet), reminded me of an earlier expedition — similarly exhilarating, but with better luck.

In the summer of 1977, Mount Etna entered a mild phase of eruption. I was living in Rome at the time. I had made a promise to myself during an earlier visit to Sicily that if Etna ever erupted while I was still in Italy, I would drop everything, jump on the next plane to Catania, and get as close to the eruption as I could. I was 26 years old and although I had no clue that I would eventually embark on a career in science writing, I rushed headlong into this adventure with an athlete’s conviction of physical invincibility and a twentysomething’s faith in improvisation. The following day, after an early morning flight, I found myself in Catania, staring up into a Mediterranean sky, Homeric in the brilliance of its blue — except for that little patch of sky near the top of the 10,808-foot volcano, marked by a smudge of gray.

Like most of the things I did in those days, I didn’t have a plan. I took a bus from the airport to the city (its local architecture, fashioned from dark blocks of Etna’s extruded lava stone, can only be described as brooding), dumped my things in a cheap pensione, and caught the first bus to the Rifugio Sapienza. This refuge, at about 6,000 feet on the lower slopes of the volcano, s erves as a lodge during — believe it — ski season, when Etna’s summit typically wears a crown of snow. As I walked across the parking lot, contemplating the suddenly dubious idea of setting off on a hike up the volcano in a pair of threadbare Adidas sneakers, I happened upon a group of journalists from the Italian television network RAI. A guide from Etna was about to drive them up to the site of the eruption in a vehicle adapted to the rugged, plantless terrain of the volcano.