On the eastern shore of Sicily are rising three large rocks, caressed by the waves. They have volcanic origin and they don’t seem to be like the other rocky formations from the shore. Rocks, they are said to have been thrown by a monster in the footsteps of Odysseus’s ship, the hero of the Trojan wars hero of the Greek mythology.
Homer, the Greek poet of the seventh century before Christ said in Odyssey that the hero of Ithaca and his comrades were held in Sicily by some giant man eaters. Their leader was Polifem more hideous than the others because he had only one eye, sitting in the middle of the crowd. While Polifem was sleeping, Odysseus and the others have sharp  a piece of olive wood, then they flushed into the fire and burning, stuck it into the only eye of the monster, then they fled to the ship with which they came.

Blind and tormented by pain, Polifem tore rocks from the mountains coast and threw them on the tracks of the fugitives. He did not hit them, but even today boulders are still being there where he throw, thing which still remember the terrible power of the monster.
As for the legend’s truth, if we look carefully to the inside of the island at about 20 km, we can see the conical tip of the Etna volcano. Its single crater, blind and deep, is like the monster’s eye.
Not once, but many times during the centuries Etna has demonstrated its ability to spout boulders on large and long distances, and it still gives today such dramatic proofs of its anger from depths.
Its eruptions are fed by a reservoir of lava, of 30 km long and 4 km deep, located under the mountains and fed by huge quantities of molten material filled with gas, located in the depths of the Earth. You might think that place is not at all favorable for human settlements. However, the Etna slopes makes one of the most densely populated regions of Sicily. The rivers of lava that flow are slow and not very numerous, rarely killing someone. People collect even five harvests of vegetables per year and fruits are growing in abundance.