The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
A Godfather tour of Sicily? Now there’s an offer you can’t refuse
Fifty years after the movie was realeased in cinemas, Mick Brown visits the filming locations across the island and searches for evidence of the Cosa Nostra in Palermo, the Mediterranean’s most sensuous city
‘The reason for this museum,” said the young man at the entrance of the No Mafia Memorial in Palermo, Sicily, “is not to glamorise. We are fighting against the myth of The Godfather and all those other films that make the Mafia look glamorous. The reality is all the people who died at their hands.”
It’s a worthy cause, but a difficult one. Monday marks the 50th anniversary of the release of The Godfather, the greatest of all Mafia movies – and our fascination with the crime organisation’s part in Sicily’s history, whether reality or myth, is as strong as ever.
On the steps of the Teatro Massimo, the setting for the operatic finale of The Godfather Part III – where Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino, cradles his daughter Mary in his arms, struck down by an assassin’s bullet – tourists took it in turns to be photographed. Walking down the pedestrianised Via Maqueda into the heart of the old city, lined with pavement cafes and gelateria, it was hard to ignore the shops selling Godfather merchandise, alongside the brightly coloured ceramic figurines and pine cones, symbolic of good health and long life (cut short in so many cases, one couldn’t help thinking, by a Mafia bullet).
Outside the town hall in the Piazza Pretoria a demonstration was assembling, the protesters carrying placards; a policewoman, smoking a cigarette, eyed the crowd uninterestedly. At the entrance to the Chiesa Santa Caterina d’Alessandria, an attendant hovered his mobile phone over my vaccination pass – still, for the moment, a requirement for entering all public buildings, restaurants and shops – nodding me through when the green tick showed.
Among Palermo’s abundance of aweinspiring churches – one, it seems, on every corner – few can match the berserk beauty of Santa Caterina d’Alessandria, every inch of its huge interior encrusted with carvings and statues of saints, cherubs and biblical scenes. It is like being drowned in an extremely rich and creamy cake.
In a large glass case, a figure of the Virgin Mary lies in perpetual sleep, dressed in a white embroidered robe and a gold crown, her head resting on ivory silk cushions. Narrow steps lead up to the roof of the church, offering an unparalleled view across the rooftops of the city to the sea beyond.
Is there any island in the Mediterranean more rich in beauty, history and character than Sicily? It has Greek archaeological sites; Arab-Norman churches and cathedrals (13 are on Unesco’s World Heritage List); the wonderful Sicilian baroque architecture of Catania, Noto, Scicli and more; the medieval hill towns and villages; lovely beaches; friendly people and, ah yes, the food. Palermo boasts four historic street markets, the oldest and busiest of which is Ballaro, crammed with food stalls, an intoxicating melange of sights, scents and entreaties from vendors vying to attract passers-by. Just be sure to hang on to your camera and wallet – it’s a pickpocket’s paradise.
So yes, there is much more to occupy you in Sicily than the Mafia, but it provides a fascinating, if sobering, bywater to explore on any visit to the island.
The No Mafia Memorial stands on the Via Vittorio Emanuele. A small museum founded in 2017, it explores the history of the organisation in all its forms, and the long and violent struggles by law enforcement to contain it. There is a library and research centre, established in the memory of Giuseppe Impastato, a political activist murdered by the Mafia in 1978, and a permanent exhibition of photographs of Mafia bosses and victims, grieving mothers and widows, and the politicians and judges who struggled – and often died – in the campaign to purge, not always successfully, organised crime from Sicily.
There are many Godfather-related tours, depending on whether you are in search of the myth or the reality, as the young man at the No Mafia Memorial put it. The myth can be explored in the places where the Sicilian scenes from The Godfather were mostly filmed – in the ravishingly picturesque villages of Savoca and Forza d’Agro, on the eastern side of the island (the area historically least affected by Mafia activity), rather than in the town of Corleone, about 40 miles south of Palermo, from which, of course, the the films’ central protagonist, Don Corleone, takes his name.
The road out of Palermo is lined with ugly apartment blocks, most of them constructed in the 1960s and 1970s during the so-called “sack of Palermo”, when orchards and villages were swept aside in a fever of building – much of it involving Mafia involvement in land speculation and construction. The road winds upwards into the hills, twisting and turning higher around hairpin bends, coming through a pass, revealing a broad valley below spotted with farms and olive groves.
At a high plateau, close to the town of Piana degli Albanesi, we pulled off the road and walked a short distance up the hill to what at first glance appeared to be a stone circle, but is actually a memorial to one of the bloodiest events in Sicily’s political history. This is Portella Della Ginestra, the site of a massacre in 1947, when shots were fired into a large crowd of farm workers celebrating May Day, killing 11 people including women and children, and injuring a fur
ther 27. A single red flag was draped over one of the rough hewn stones.
The massacre was perpetrated by Salvatore Giuliano, a local bandit ostensibly operating on behalf of the Mafia and local landowners, to terrify workers into not supporting the Communist party. Giuliano later claimed that the massacre was “a mistake” – he had intended his men to fire over the heads over the crowd, not at them. (The massacre was alluded to in a subsequently deleted scene from The Godfather, in which Michael Corleone, exiled to Sicily, walking in the countryside with his two bodyguards, witnesses a crowd of marchers headed to Portella Della Ginestra, singing The Red Flag.)
Salvatore Giuliano occupies a peculiarly ambivalent place in Sicilian history, part murderous criminal, part Robin Hood. I had seen archive film of him in the No Mafia Memorial – a dashing figure, like a young Marlon Brando, with a pistol tucked into his waistband. The Swedish journalist and spy Maria Cyliakus, who spent time with Giuliano, and was probably his lover, romanticised his life as “a violent poem”, saying “a film producer would be fascinated by his masculine and healthy figure”. A prophetic statement: there have been two films made of his life.
He was shot dead in 1950. The assassin was his right-hand man, Gaspare Pisciotta, who claimed to have killed Giuliano on the instruction of Mario Scelba, the Italian minister of the interior. It was Pisciotta who defined the symbiotic relationship at the criminal heart of Sicily: “We are a single body, banditry, police and Mafia, like the father, the son and the Holy Ghost.”
A photograph of Pisciotta in the No Mafia Memorial shows a dapper, saturnine figure with a pencil moustache and a cashmere overcoat draped casually over his shoulders in gangster style. A second photograph is captioned “The coffin of Pisciotta”. He died in prison in 1954 after drinking coffee laced with strychnine.
We stopped at Piana degli Albanesi, where the streets are named after victims of the 1947 massacre. In the 15th century, the region was settled by Albanians, Christians fleeing the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. An Albanian dialect, Arberisht, is still widely spoken and can be seen on road signs and shop fronts. In a shop selling pastries, a woman was preparing cannoli, the ubiquitous Sicilian delicacy of a shell of fried pastry dough filled with ricotta and garnished with dried fruit and pistachios. It was the best I’d ever eaten. The excursion was becoming a strange contradiction between the disturbing echoes of history and the simple pleasures of the moment.
We drove on towards Corleone, our progress slowed by a tractor. It had started to rain. In the distance, you could see the last of the winter snows lying like cotton wool in the folds of the mountains; it was a scene of melancholic beauty. Much of Sicily is mountainous, and one of the attractions of the island is the ease with which one can escape the crowds at even the height of the tourist season. Now, it felt almost as if we had the island completely to ourselves. Outside the town, we passed Rocca Busambra, the highest peak in the Monti Sicani mountain range. It was here that, in 2009, the remains were found of the body of Placido Rizzotto, a trade union leader from Corleone, who in 1948, leading the campaign by farm labourers to take over unfarmed land from landowners, was kidnapped and murdered by the Mafia. The sole witness to the murder was a 12-year-old dumb shepherd boy, Giusse Letizia, who the day after Rizzotto’s murder was himself murdered by a lethal injection administered by a local Mafioso doctor, Michel Navarra.
The centre of Corleone is a medieval maze of twisting, narrow streets. We visited on the feast day of Saint Leoluca – a 10th-century abbot and miracle worker who was born in Corleone – and the town was as quiet as the grave; shops were shut, windows shuttered, the streets almost deserted, the rain shining on the cobbled streets. In the pretty square stood a statue of Bernadino Verro, Corleone’s first socialist mayor, who was murdered by the Mafia in 1915.
Down an alleyway beside the town hall stood the site of another museum recording the history of the town’s ignoble Mafia history – the Museo Antimafia, set in a former convent, on three floors of exhibition space. It was bitterly cold – fitting, it seemed, for what was on display. In the first room the walls were lined floor to ceiling with just a fraction of the court documents from the 1986 “maxi-trial” of 475 people accused of Mafia-related crimes. The largest criminal trial in history, it was conducted in a specially constructed courtroom in a Palermo prison, and led to 338 people being sentenced to a total of 2,665 years, not including life sentences handed to 19 bosses.
“And this,” said our guide, leading us upstairs, “is the room with the most violent killings” – a display of the extraordinary photographs of Letizia Battaglia, who chronicled the Mafia and their crimes with an unflinching candour and courage through the 1970s to the 1990s, receiving numerous death threats as a result. Like the American photographer Weegee, Battaglia had an uncanny ability to arrive at the scene of a murder before the blood had dried. Her images show a politician slumped in the seat of his car, his body riddled with bullets; a body lying face down in a
Today, he said, the Mafia no longer kill people ‘unless it is strictly necessary’
pool of blood, his hands tucked into the pockets of his jacket – a warning to others to mind your own business; and a photograph of the ruthless Mafia boss, Leoluca Bagarella, handcuffed, his face contorted into a mask of hatred.
Born in Corleone, Bagarella rose to become head of the Corleonesi, the most violent of all the Mafia clans, which in the 1980s waged war against the Palermo Mafia, a period known as “La Mattanza” (the slaughter), when Mafia activity resulted in the death of hundreds of people including politicians, magistrates, businessmen, journalists and the police.
Enamoured of the film The Godfather, Bagarella modelled himself on the figure of Don Corleone, and had the movie’s title theme played at the party to celebrate his marriage to the sister of another Mafia boss in Palermo’s swishest hotel. In 1995 he was tried for multiple murders and sentenced to 13 life sentences plus 106 years and 10 months, and solitary confinement for six years. “If ever he comes out,” my guide said, “it will be the end of the world.”
The most violent days of the Mafia, he went on, have passed. Now, sharply booted and besuited and to outward appearances at least respectable, it had infiltrated the highest ranks of business and politics. Today, he said, they no longer kill people “unless it is strictly necessary”. This was reassuring. One could return with an easy mind to the more peaceful pleasures the island has to offer. Leaving the Museo Antimafia, we retreated to the warmth of the only place open, the Caffe Ruggirello, opposite the town hall. In the seating area, the walls were decorated with film stills and posters from The Godfather. On the counter was a plate of cannoli – an offer you couldn’t refuse.