I've lost friends to volcanoes, but I still love them

Dario Tedesco grew up in Naples, in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. When he followed a girl to France, he found himself falling in love with volcanoes instead. Since then, he’s spent a huge part of his life studying and exploring different volcanoes.
Three volcanoes have defined his life.

At 25 years old, Dario was on an expedition on Kilauea in Hawaii, when his supervisor fell into a lava flow. In a split-second decision, Dario pulled him to safety and saved his life. Several years later, Dario was set to go on Mount Unzen in Japan, to see it erupt for the first time in almost 200 years. When he had to drop out last-minute, tragedy struck. And in 2002, Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of Congo suddenly erupted. Because of a report Dario wrote years earlier, he was the first person called to look into what had happened. Since then, Nyiragongo has become the volcano that he has studied the most – and its lava lake is, perhaps, the place that he loves the most.

(Photo: Dario Tedesco standing on Mount Nyiragongo in 2021. Dario is wearing a green waterproof jacket and round glasses on dark volcanic rock. White steam rises from vents in the rocky landscape behind him, with the rim of a volcanic crater visible in the distance under a cloudy sky. Credit: Alexis Huguet/Getty Images)

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Presenter: India Rakusen
Producer: Florian Bohr