'Have you got any rooms for tonight?'

It seemed like a reasonable question, but the woman behind the reception desk is looking at me as if I'd enquired about the Pope's religious affiliations.

'Of course we have a room, the season is over,' she tells me, and her tone suggests my impertinent arrival has completely ruined the game of solitaire she was probably planning to spin out until April. 'We have 200 rooms. They are all empty. Take your pick.'

And so it was that driving along Italy's Amalfi coast, I flopped in need of a stiff drink into the first hotel I found and gratefully took one of the 200 rooms, wandering around the cavernous lobby with its shut-up shops containing the summer-just-gone's must-have bikinis, past the open-air swimming pool, glowing neglected like a lime jelly, and along endless, deserted corridors. Later, I went for dinner in the vast restaurant and, after spending an age deciding where to sit - oh, how choice creates anxiety! - I was attended by two white-tailed waiters. A clock on the wall provided the soundtrack. I felt like Howard Hughes.

The next day brought a ride south through the lonely toe of Calabria, and a hop over the Straits of Messina. Unlike the hotels of Italy's south-west coast, the landlords of Taormina in Sicily seem to be having no trouble attracting out-of-season guests. In fact, I seem to have accidentally discovered where the English aristocracy of a certain age goes to escape the riff-raff. For at breakfast the next day, in a dining room full of ancient dowagers shuffling on sticks around the buffet table and talking like the Queen, a rakish gentleman, who may well have been the Duke of Kent, leaped to his feet, looked out of the mullioned window, and brayed loudly to nobody in particular: 'Bugger those darned clouds. Still can't see Etna.'

An hour later and I can see Etna very clearly. Having ridden my motorbike up its gentle foothills, at first among the citrus groves and then through the twisted and tortured black petrified lava flows, I am now with a group in a giant 4WD truck traversing the monochromed upper slopes, littered with fissures and extinct cones.

Above us, alarmingly close, looms the summit, maybe less than a mile away, whose four live craters are belching huge clouds of black smoke, activity that has had vulcanologists carefully monitoring Etna for the past few weeks. The volcano last erupted in 2002, says my leaflet, destroying the town of Piano Provenzana, which, I note, is a lot further away from the action than where we are now. It all has the feel of a bungee jump, or a roller-coaster ride, where you know it's safe ... kind of ... but still ...

We are turfed out of the truck and left to wade through the sand-like ash. The cool, thin air starts to warm and thicken and there is a slight hissing noise that grows and grows as we walk until it sounds like the gods are knocking up cappuccinos.

Suddenly we are staring at a river of fire, just a few metres away, spewing smoothly, inexorably, out of a crack in the earth and then gurgling off down the slopes, fizzing and spitting. It is simultaneously the most terrifying and beautiful thing I have ever seen. There are no fences, nothing to stop you leaping in, no guides nannying you, no lectures on how close you can go. For faced with this, there is really no need.

Next week

Mike hooks up with a posse of fellow midlife-crisis males and relives some painful scenes from his marriage ...