Aeolian Islands capital — pumice-white cliffs, obsidian beaches, Malvasia wine, and the finest prehistoric museum in southern Italy
Lipari is the largest of the Aeolian Islands (37 km², population 11,000), a UNESCO World Heritage archipelago of seven volcanic islands north of Sicily in the Tyrrhenian Sea. The main town clusters around a Norman-Byzantine castle hill (the acropolis, with its cathedral and archaeological museum occupying the ancient citadel) above a double harbour. The island's white pumice cliffs on the northern coast (the Cave di Pomice — now largely abandoned quarries that once supplied 70% of global pumice production) are visually extraordinary: sheer white faces descending to fluorescent turquoise sea.…
Lipari's obsidian — a volcanic glass with a razor-sharp edge — made the island the primary tool-manufacturing centre of the Neolithic and Bronze Age Mediterranean. Lipari obsidian has been found on Malta, in Egypt, and across the Aegean; islanders controlled a monopoly trading network for millennia. The Greeks colonised the island in 580 BCE. Subsequently passing through Syracusan, Carthaginian, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, and Norman rule, the cathedral on the acropolis was built by Norman Roger I in 1088.