Volcanoes of Italy - the Grand Tour

Tour guide

The expedition will be accompanied by a professional volcanologist and geologist from our team with extensive experience on the Italian volcanoes. Normally, this is either volcanologist Yashmin Chebli or company founder Tom Pfeiffer.
Yashmin Chebli (1970) is trained geologist with a university Master's degree and member of SGF (Société Géologique de France). He has been working as tour guide and expedition leader to actives volcanoes, volcano photographer and consultant for more than 30 years. His areas of expertise include the active volcanoes in Italy, Vanuatu, the Hawaiian Islands, Guatemala, RD of Congo, Tanzania, Costa Rica and others. Besides his mother tongue French, Yashmin speaks several languages including English, Italian, and Spanish.
Website: www.vanuatu-expedition.com (photos) and Youtube channel!
Dr. Tom Pfeiffer (1970) is a German volcanologist with a PhD degree in geology about the volcanic history of Santorini volcano from the University of Aarhus in Denmark.
For more than 20 years, Tom has been working on volcanic systems (Hawai'i and Vesuvius volcano observatories), observing volcanic eruptions around the world and organizing guided tours to active volcanoes in Europe (Santorini, Etna, Stromboli,...), Kilauea on Hawaii as well as in Africa and Indonesia. During his travels, he found his strongest passion in photography (link to his book) and the sharing of his knowledge and new travel adventures with people outside the scientific community. He first started a tour company in 2004 and is still guiding most VolcanoAdventures tours in Greece and Italy as well as the pilot expeditions and special eruption tours.

His other professional activities include a large number of articles about volcanoes published in newspapers and magazines such as National Geographic, Scientific American and others. Tom also participated in documentary film productions about Santorini (“The myth of the lost city of Atlantis”, "Mystery Hunters", both on Discovery Channel) and Stromboli (“Quarks and co: Vulkane” on the German television channel WDR), as well as the ongoing documentary series about active volcanoes "Volcanic Odysseys" by Canadian filmmaker Michael Dalton (Love Nature & Smithsonian Channel).

Besides his German mother tongue, Tom speaks English, Danish and Italian fluently and can also communicate in Greek, French and some Spanish. He lived for 7 years in Denmark, spent about 2 years in Italy and worked one year on Santorini, Greece, before moving to Athens in 2004.

Physical requirements

This trip requires a good general physical condition and some hiking experience. The time spent on individual excursions range from 1 hour up to ca. 6-8 hours, including breaks, but these timings are variable as they also depend on the weather, opportunities to observe and photograph volcanic activity etc. Most hikes are fairly easy, with climbing efforts between 100-400 m and total walking times under 3 hours. Exceptions are the more strenuous climb to Stromboli's summit, where around 900 m of altitude have to be climbed, and the potential climb to Etna's summit craters which can take up to 4 hours or more of total walking (weather and volcanic activity permitting these hikes). These latter excursions can be considered as optional and can be shortened by all or part of the group (possibility to split up, see program for details). People with asthma or other breathing difficulties should contact their medical doctor and are kindly requested to also inform us about this on beforehand.