In Pictures: Etna’s spectacular new eruption

Mount Etna belched smoke and ashes in a new eruption this week but Italian authorities said the volcano, one of the world’s most active, did not pose any danger to the villages nearby. “We’ve seen worse,” the head of the INGV National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology in the nearby city of Catania, Stefano Branca, told Italian news agency AGI. Estimating that the eruption from Etna’s southeastern crater began late on Tuesday afternoon, Branca insisted that the latest burst of activity was “not at all worrying”.