Etna from the east flank, and how to tell if the summit is clear
From Nunziata di Mascali, a hamlet on Etna's east flank about 15 km below the craters, one camera looks west and holds the whole east side of the mountain in a single frame. On the site it is the Mount Etna Eastern Volcanic Panorama. Unlike nearly everything else we carry it is not a still that refreshes, it is continuous video at 2K, published by the Sicilian weather outfit Weather Sicily as a YouTube live stream called Panoramica Etna est. Morning is its hour. The camera faces west, so the sun comes up behind it and lands on the flank it is pointing at, and the summit cone stands against a clean sky before the afternoon cloud builds over it.
The other one that looks at the mountain rather than past it is Vulcano Etna Sud Est, a 1920x1080 still from vedetta.org. It is named for the South-East Crater, the cone that has done most of the recent building, rather than for where the camera stands. I pulled a frame at 01:06 UTC today and it arrived with a burnt-in clock reading 21-10-2026 03:06:38, local time, current to the second, and the picture under it completely black. That is what an unlit volcano looks like at three in the morning.
How often that frame moves is worth measuring rather than assuming. I fetched the image every 15 seconds from 01:20:15 to 01:24:53 UTC and got eighteen byte-identical files, the burnt-in clock still reading 03:06:38 through all of them, and a fresh pull at 01:25:08 matched them too. A clock that does not advance means the file is not being rewritten, so before dawn this one rests rather than quietly serving black. The hour you open it matters more here than it would on a traffic camera.
Where the summit cameras are
Neither of ours sits on the mountain. The cameras above the tree line belong to the cable car company: Funivia dell'Etna publishes three, one at the Stazione 2500 mt pointed at the summit craters, one from Montagnola, and one at Piano Provenzana covering the ski ground on the north slope. The page says they stand "at strategic points above 2,500 meters" and that each carries a timelapse of the previous day. That last part is the good bit, and the thing I would copy: you can drag back through yesterday instead of hoping you opened the page at the right minute. All three run on SkylineWebcams' player, embedded in that page.
The monitoring cameras are a different animal again. INGV's Osservatorio Etneo runs the ones the volcanologists actually read, at La Montagnola, Nicolosi and Monte Cagliato, in visible light and in thermal, carried on the GARR research network since February 2022. Thermal is the one worth knowing about. It keeps working after dark, and it will show you a vent through a fair amount of ash.
The coast cameras are the cloud check
Etna spends a great many days inside its own weather, and there is little point opening a summit camera to look at grey. The coast is the cheap check, and it is where the cameras are thick on the ground. Taormina stands about 29 km north-east of the craters, high on the Villa Belvedere side of the town; at 03:07:55 this morning its frame was the string of lights round the bay and nothing above them. Catania Borgo-Sanzio is 27 km south, and the camera at Campeggio Jonio sits on the city's east shore. When all three are in clear air the mountain is usually worth opening. I would not lean on that too hard, mind. Etna builds a cap cloud on mornings when the coast is flawless, which is half of why people watch it.
What sits within 60 km
Counted today, six live cameras fall within 30 km of the craters and sixteen within 60 km, out of 4,030 live in Italy. Most of the sixteen are village and beach weather cameras that happen to be nearby rather than views of the volcano. We carry nothing facing the mountain from the north or the west, so Randazzo, Bronte and the whole Alcantara side are empty on this particular subject, and Linguaglossa is where I would start looking for the next one.
The thing I keep coming back to is that timelapse. Funivia keeps yesterday and lets you drag through it. We keep one frame and the result of a check, across 137,557 cameras in 154 countries as of this morning. Storing a day of stills for all of them is not sensible. Storing it for the few hundred where the thing in the frame changes slowly and visibly, a volcano, a glacier, a harbour, a building site, might well be. I do not know where that line sits yet, and Etna is the obvious place to go and find out.