Isole Eolie (Aeolian Islands)

Stromboli's clockwork fireworks and Vulcano's steaming crater gave science the very names of two eruption styles, and the seven Aeolian Islands off Sicily's north coast have schooled geologists for over two centuries. This volcanic archipelago — Lipari, Salina, Panarea and their siblings rising steeply from the Tyrrhenian — earned natural World Heritage status from UNESCO in 2000 as a living textbook of island-building, eruption and erosion, still rewriting itself with every rumble.