VIDEO. " Look at this ! ": Etna erupting again in Sicily

The Sicilian volcano Etna, very close to the port city of Catania, erupted on Tuesday.

The spectacular scene was harmless to the villages surrounding the volcano.

The eruption caused a rain of small volcanic stones and ash on Catania, whose airport was closed.

The subsidence of part of the south-eastern crater of the famous volcano caused an overflow and a slide of lava along the western wall, said an official of the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology (INGV) at the Agi agency.

"We have seen worse", commented Stefano Branca, director of Ingv in Catania, judging that the event which started at the end of the afternoon "was not at all worrying". The images of the eruption show in the late afternoon a pink plume above the snow-capped summit of the volcano. Once night fell, Etna was still the scene of many incandescent lava flows. Etna is the highest active volcano (3,324 meters) in Europe, with frequent eruptions for around 500,000 years.