Volcanism of Italy

The volcanism of Italy is due chiefly to the presence, a short distance to the south, of the boundary between the Eurasian Plate and the African Plate. Italy is a volcanically active country, containing the only active volcanoes in mainland Europe (while volcanic islands are also present in Greece, in the volcanic arc of the southern Aegean). The lava erupted by Italy's volcanoes is thought to result from the subduction and melting of one plate below another.

Three main clusters of volcanism exist: a line of volcanic centres running northwest along the central part of the Italian mainland (see: Campanian volcanic arc); a cluster northeast of Sicily in the Aeolian Islands; and a cluster southwest of Sicily around the island of Pantelleria, in the Mediterranean's Strait of Sicily. Sardinia has had a totally separate geological history from that of the rest of Italy, where several cycles of volcanic activity occurred, the last of which ended at the beginning of the Pleistocene, but currently hosts only permanently extinct volcanoes.

Due to their position within densely populated areas, Etna and Vesuvius have been included in the list of "Volcanoes of the Decade", a global list of volcanoes to be kept under closer surveillance. In particular, the "Volcanoes of the Decade" is a list drawn up by International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior, as part of a United Nations project, which includes, overall, 16 volcanoes distributed all over the world.

Italy was the first country to exploit geothermal energy to produce electricity. The high geothermal gradient that forms part of the peninsula makes it potentially exploitable also in other regions; research carried out in the 1960s and 1970s identified potential geothermal fields in Lazio and Tuscany, as well as in most volcanic islands.

Four of Italy's volcanoes have erupted in the last one-hundred and fifty years:

At least 10 other volcanic centres have seen eruptions in historic times. In order of the most recent eruptions, they are:

In addition to the volcanoes on land, there are three submarine volcanoes in the seas surrounding Italy, in particular in the south-eastern Tyrrhenian and in the Strait of Sicily:

In Italy there is also a large number of geological structures due to extinct volcanic centres. It is possible to group these volcanoes into various categories: