Brydone called on a local priest for whom he carried letters of introduction, Canon Giuseppe Recupero. The canon turned out to the tbe perfect host. He found the party accommodation in a loval convent, showed them around the city, and, best of all enthralled them with his stories of local history.
His extensive knowledge of vulanology, and his facetious manner, immediately endeared him to Brydone, and before long the two were chatting enthusiastically about Etna and its eruptions.
Recupero turned out to be the local expect. He has become interested in the volcano quite by chance fifteen years earlier, when his abbot had asked him to investigate a stream of boiling mud that erupted from its side, and since then had made an exhaustive study of its geology. There was scarcely anything he didn't know.
He suprised Brydone by revealing that the lava field his party has crossed the previous afternoon came from no recent eruption, but had lain there for almost two thousand years.
Its origin was well documented. According to the Sicilian historian Diodorus Siculus, it had flowed from the mountain in the third century BC, during the second Punic war. At that time the war was at its height, and the souther city of Syracuse was under siege by the Roman army. To relieve the siege, the Carthaginian commander, Imilco, began a fored march down Sicily's eastern coast. At Acireale - where Brydone had encounted the barren lava - Imilco found the route blocked by 'rivers and streams of fire', and was forced to make a lengthy detour around Etna. Recupero had confirmed this historical account from insriptions he found carved into Roman monument on the lava itself.
But the discovery that the lava field was close to two thousand years old has an even more dramatic implication, Taking Brydone into his confidence, Recupero revealed that Etna had to be much older than the Bible said it was. As evidence, he led Brydone to a deep well which had been sunk through several layers of lava. What was so important about the well, Recupero pointed out, was that between each layer of lava lay a substantial layer of soil. From the barren blinker bed at Acirieale, he knew that it took more than two thousand years to form even a thin layer of soil on the surface of a lava flow, therefor there must have been more than that space of time between each of the eruptions which formed the strata in the well.
Not far away was a deep pit that has been cut through seven such layers. 'Now', said Recupero, 'the eruption which formed the lowest of these lavas, if we may be allowed to reason from analogy, must have flowed from the mountain at least 14'000 years ago'.