Aeolian Islands

The Aeolian Islands form a volcanic archipelago in the Tyrrhenian Sea, north of Sicily, made up of seven main islands and several islets totalling some 115 km² of land above water and around 15,000 inhabitants. UNESCO inscribed them on the World Heritage List in 2000 under criterion (viii), the geological one, with an inscribed area of 1,216 hectares.

Their scientific value is foundational. The archipelago has given volcanology two of its basic terms: the Strombolian eruptive style, after the rhythmic, persistent explosions of Stromboli, which has been continuously active for millennia and is known as "the lighthouse of the Mediterranean", and the Vulcanian style, after the explosive eruptions of the island of Vulcano, which in turn gave its name to the word volcano itself. Studied since the eighteenth century, the Aeolians have been and remain a natural laboratory for understanding the building and destruction of island volcanic edifices.

Each island offers a different stage of that geological story: from the active volcanism of Stromboli and Vulcano, with their fumaroles and sulphur fields, to the extinct and eroded cones of Alicudi and Filicudi, by way of the obsidian flows and pumice quarries of Lipari, worked since the Neolithic and the object of a trade that reached across the whole western Mediterranean. The vegetation is Mediterranean scrub adapted to volcanic soils, and the cliffs hold seabird colonies.