(FORTUNE Magazine) – Ten years ago, while on a cruise off Italy's southern coast, I saw my first volcano. The announcement that we were passing it came during the boozy roar of the second dinner seating. I was the only one who went outside. It looked like a cartoon volcano, an island unto itself, black against a blue night sky, with a wisp of smoke on top.

I finally made it back to Stromboli a few months ago. I was in Naples for work, and it was too close not to go.

There are a lot of us volcano freaks out there. We generally don't describe our affliction very eloquently. To try sounds pompous, given the themes: creation, destruction, life, death, passion.... Mostly, though, it's about sex--"the spurt of fire, the dribble of lava," as Susan Sontag put it in The Volcano Lover. Repression is also a factor--the unstoppable force held back until it can't be held back any longer. Tightly laced Boston must have done it to me. Switzerland also seems to produce a lot of people who hang around volcanoes, waiting for something to happen. Germany too.

"We love wallcaynose," said a woman from Munich whom I met on a Hawaiian expedition last fall. "We have been to 15." As she talked, it became clear that she did not love them--not at all. Her husband did. "We were in Chile last year and went to very many. After that he promised me: no more wallcaynose." A married look--resignation, really--came to her eyes. "Now we are here," she said.

"Here" was a fine advertisement for the joys of staying home: a misanthrope's dreamscape of hardened lava spreading for miles. The slopes of Kilauea are supremely inhospitable, gorgeous in the way that only desolate, deadly places can be. We scurried across the hellishness of it. The lumpy black fields radiated solar-powered cancer beams and made an odd crunching underfoot, like corn flakes. During two hours of vigorous hiking, we baked our brains to jelly and drowned ourselves in sweat. A glowing red appeared in cracks beneath our feet, and a new, sulfurous heat blasted up at us. On the upper slopes, trees tipped and burned. We couldn't see the force that slowly, methodically pushed them down. We hopped from foot to foot to keep our shoes from melting. And there it was, inside a black tunnel: the river of glowing lava sweeping softly past, like liquid candy. The silence was the weirdest part.

At that moment, according to waivers I'd signed, gases could have asphyxiated me or blown me sky-high, or I could have fallen through a weak-roofed lava tube into a chamber of bubbling magma.

"Even volcanoes that are well monitored can erupt suddenly and by surprise," says Jim Luhr, director of the Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program. Luhr has noticed an increase in volcano tourism and thinks it's media driven. "Interest cranked up with Mount St. Helens and Mount Pinatubo," he says. "The positive thing is we get people outdoors, appreciating the spectacle of nature. The downside is people sometimes get taken to the wrong place at the wrong time. We just put a story on our Website about Nicaragua. A hundred tourists got off a cruise ship, into buses, and rode up to Masaya, where volcanic bombs showered down on them. And at Arenal, in Costa Rica, last August, an American woman and daughter hired a local guide. He took them into a dangerous place, a pyroclastic flow came down, and they got cooked."

Kilauea was tame in comparison (we got close enough to poke the flow with our walking sticks). It's a shield volcano, with lava that moves fluidly, so it tends to behave less explosively than would a stratovolcano, like Arenal, where thicker lava will plug vents, build domes, and trap gases, creating more violent eruptions. Mount St. Helens is a stratovolcano. So is Stromboli.

On the sunrise hydrofoil from Sicily, locals smirked as we volcano lovers darted around trying to get a view through scratched-up windows. Stromboli emerged on the horizon. It loomed taller as we approached, scarred black in its craggy valleys, weakly green elsewhere, wearing a cap of steam.

The island is basically two fishing villages and the volcano, which hovers over everything. When Ingrid Bergman filmed Stromboli here in 1949, she had an affair with director Roberto Rossellini. It's easy enough to imagine how such an intrigue could begin. Stromboli is a perversely sexy place. The symbol of the island--a floating heart that spurts red goo from its cleavage--is painted on walls and doorways. Among locals, the just-rolled-out-of-bed look is a popular one.

The main attraction of Stromboli is the regularity of its eruptions. Several times an hour, a gassy explosion will spew vapor, molten lava, and chunks of pyroclastic ejecta (an excellent volcano word) into the air. The best way to see this is to climb to the top. Guides take a group up almost every evening--the proverbial three-hour tour.

When we started the sky was clear, but as we climbed, the vents began to spit prodigious vapor. By the time we reached the summit we couldn't see in front of our noses. Our guide, Angelo, parked us there. It was too dangerous to go forward or backward. We experienced the eruptions as pure sound, thunderous booms followed by tumbles of rock raining down. Angelo went around and tapped our heads. He wanted us to put on our helmets. There was a big boom, and a lot more rocks thudded down. We put on our helmets.

The following night, I got a much clearer view from a boat offshore. Flares of lava shot out of Stromboli's peak, sending orange flashes through a sky creamy with stars. But it was the first night, up on top, that struck the chord, though I couldn't see a thing. I don't know how long we were in the vapor haze. It seemed like forever. During the first explosions, frightened people leaped to their feet, but there was nowhere to go. Eventually some of us lay in the rubble to rest. I closed my eyes. The earth rumbled under the length of my body. Then silence. The rain of boulders had to fall somewhere. We lay there, and we waited.

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