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There's a cafe in a quiet Sicilian village that played an important role in "The Godfather."
Thanks to its remote cliffside location, the quiet Sicilian village of Savoca seems idyllically frozen in time, with preserved medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque architecture. Among these historic buildings is Bar Vitelli, a small, stone-flagged café that played an important role in the film The Godfather. Though the film’s fictitious criminal family is supposed to be from the town of Corleone, on the western side of the island, director Francis Ford Coppola chose settings across Sicily’s eastern coast, including ones outside Savoca’s local bar and church. When he began filming in the 1970s, the actual town of Corleone had too few historic sites left to fit his vision. Savoca had the perfect pastoral visuals needed to capture the scene. If you pay close attention to the movie, you’ll notice that Coppola carefully left out any views of the Mediterranean Sea.
