around Sicily lured the unwary to their death. Morgan is associated not only with Sicily's Mount Etna (the supposedly hollow mountain locally identified as Avalon since the 12th century), but also with sirens. In a medieval French Arthurian romance of the 13th century, Floriant et Florete, she is called "mistress of the fairies of the salt sea" (La mestresse [des] fées de la mer salée). Ever since that time, Fata Morgana has been associated with Sicily in the Italian folklore and literature. For example, a local legend connects Morgan and her magical mirages with Roger I of Sicily and the Norman conquest of the island from the Arabs. Walter Charleton, in his 1654 treatise "Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana", devotes several pages to the description of the Morgana of Rhegium, in the Strait of Messina (Book III, Chap. II, Sect. II). He records that a similar phenomenon was reported in Africa by Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian writing in the first century BC, and that the Rhegium Fata Morgana was described by Damascius, a Greek philosopher of the sixth century AD. In addition, Charleton tells us that Athanasius Kircher described the Rhegium mirage in his book of travels. An early mention of the term Fata Morgana in English, in 1818, referred to such a mirage noticed in the Strait of Messina, between Calabria and Sicily. Famous legends and observations The Flying Dutchman The Flying Dutchman, according to folklore, is a ghost ship that can never go home, and is doomed to sail the seven seas forever. The Flying Dutchman is usually spotted from afar, sometimes seen to be glowing with ghostly light. One of the possible explanations of the origin of the Flying Dutchman legend is a Fata Morgana mirage seen at sea. A Fata Morgana superior mirage of a ship can take many different forms. Even when the boat in the mirage does not seem to be suspended in the air, it still looks ghostly, and unusual, and what is even more important, it is ever-changing in its appearance. Sometimes a Fata Morgana causes a ship to appear to float inside the waves, at other times an inverted ship appears to sail above its real companion. In fact, with a Fata Morgana it can be hard to say which individual segment of the mirage is real and which is not real: when a real ship is out of sight because it is