ETNA

Trained first in the arts, Carmelo later earned a degree in architecture from Sapienza University in Rome, but photography has been a constant companion since childhood — he began capturing Sicily’s marine and agricultural landscapes at just 12 years old. Based in Rosolini, he observed over years the terrain of the Iblei region — a mosaic of rural civilisation, biodiversity, and ancient cultural layers. Carmelo works across conceptual landscape photography, urban exploration, and anthropological visual narratives, and his images have appeared in Vogue Italia’s “Photographers” section and National Geographic as well as exhibited in galleries in Europe and beyond.

For Carmelo, photography is not about technique but perception — about seeing and feeling the world as it truly is. His work often explores the deep relationship between place, culture, and identity, with Sicily’s natural and human landscapes providing an endless source of reflection.

His images, rendered in luminous black and white, capture the stillness of ancient terrains, where memory seems to be embedded in stone and shadow.

What draws you to the arts?

Art in general represents a way to generate beauty. Contact with art and everything it produces has the power to make us feel in harmony with the world around us and fosters physical and mental well-being.

What did you like best about this photography project?

The project has strong ties to Greek mythology and literature. Etna offers inspiration and reflection, Dantesque landscapes of a land scorched by fire in a surreal, mystical, and mysterious atmosphere.
These places resemble hell, the world of the damned described in Dante Alighieri’s famous comedy. Dante’s hell is the place of moral misery in which fallen humanity finds itself, deprived of the divine grace capable of enlightening human actions.

In his series Etna, Carmelo turns his lens toward one of the island’s most awe-inspiring presences — Mount Etna, both a geological force and a mythic symbol. At 3,000 metres above sea level, the mountain exists in a realm where cold and warm air currents meet, creating a space that is both earthly and otherworldly. His black-and-white photographs reveal the mountain’s surface as a living organism: fissured, scorched, and breathing with light. The textures of volcanic rock, the play of mist and ash, and the delicate forms of vegetation reclaiming the soil together compose a landscape of quiet intensity and resilience.

This is a terrain that invites metaphysical contemplation. In Carmelo’s lens, Etna becomes a mirror for the human condition — a place of destruction and renewal, solitude and endurance. The series draws heavily on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, particularly its infernal imagery.

Just as Dante’s Inferno traces the descent into the moral and spiritual depths of humanity, Carmelo’s vision of Etna portrays a world shaped by elemental power

— a landscape that recalls the “dark wood” of human uncertainty and the purifying journey toward redemption. Etna, in his interpretation, is not hell but its echo: a reminder of the thin line between the sacred and the damned, between beauty and desolation. The monochrome palette intensifies this duality, stripping the image of distraction and allowing contrasts of light and shadow to convey the emotional depth of the scene. What emerges is a sense of timelessness — a visual meditation on endurance, on the ceaseless dialogue between nature’s violence and its grace.

For Carmelo Micieli, art is an act of harmony — “a way to generate beauty,” as he says, “that connects us to the world and restores balance between the physical and the spiritual.” His Etna series embodies this belief, transforming volcanic rock and ash into poetry of form and light.