About this journey

Gurrida sits on the flanks of Mount Etna, and the journey south to Catania Borgo follows the Ferrovia Circumetnea — a narrow-gauge line built between 1895 and 1898 to encircle the volcano. Running on 950 mm gauge, the 110-kilometre route loops clockwise around Etna, and this segment traces the southern arc toward the coast and the city.

At Catania Borgo the Circumetnea meets a very different piece of infrastructure. In the 1990s, the 4-kilometre section that once continued to Catania Porto was converted to standard gauge and moved largely underground to form the Catania Metro, which has operated since 27 June 1999. Because of that conversion, Catania Borgo became the terminus for all Circumetnea narrow-gauge services, and FCE now administers both the railway and the metro from offices at the same station. The metro itself draws power from 3000 V DC overhead wires — an arrangement found on no other metro system outside Brazil. The contrast the journey offers is quietly striking: a late-19th-century volcano railway, built to a gauge chosen for mountain terrain, arriving at a station that also serves one of Europe's more technically unusual urban transit systems.