In 1669, lava from Mount Etna crossed seven kilometres of farmland and poured into the Ionian Sea, leaving Castello Ursino — raised in the 1240s as a fortress washed by waves — stranded well inland. The same eruption pushed Catania's shoreline outward and laid down the black shelf on which the modern harbour sits. Boats casting off from Porto di Catania today leave from ground that did not exist eight centuries ago. Catania boat trip with aperitif prosecco and snorkeling tours all begin at this quay on Via Cardinale Dusmet, beneath the arches of the 1866 Marina viaduct, on what the Catanese still call a gita in barca. North of the port lies the Riviera dei Ciclopi, the Cyclops Coast. Homer placed Polyphemus here; the Odyssey has the blinded giant hurling boulders at a fleeing ship. Geologists give a colder account. The faraglioni off Aci Trezza are columns of basalt, cooled underwater roughly 500,000 years ago, older than Etna itself. Their prismatic jointing is textbook. In 1989 the Italian state made the surrounding water a marine protected area, the Area Marina Protetta Isole Ciclopi, which is why the seabed below a Cyclops Coast sailing cruise remains unusually intact. The aperitivo that gives these Sicilian aperitif sailing excursions their name is a northern Italian custom adapted to a southern table. Prosecco arrives chilled; the plates are local — Nocellara olives, caponata, pistachio from Bronte grown on Etna's western slope, young tuma cheese. Sicilians drink before dinner, not instead of it, and the ritual is deliberately unhurried. At anchor, with the engine cut, the logic of it becomes clear: the boat drifts, the glasses are poured, and the coastline is read slowly rather than photographed at speed. Beneath the surface the register changes again. Posidonia oceanica meadows filter the shallows, sea urchins graze the lava, and the collapsed tubes of old flows form caves and arches at snorkelling depth. Further north, past the Norman keep of Aci Castello built on black pillow lava, the coast opens toward Taormina and Isola Bella — the islet Florence Trevelyan bought in 1890 and planted as a private garden. A catania boat trip with aperitif prosecco and snorkeling tour covers a shoreline that is at once mythological, volcanic and horticultural, and it is the sea, not the coast road, that shows how the three connect.