Following in the footsteps of ‘The Godfather’ in stunning Sicily

The Godfather was once described by the film critic Roger Ebert as the only movie that we can all agree on – it’s a masterpiece.

Fifty years on from its initial release, the Italian-American family saga is still as fresh as ever. I went to Sicily to follow in its footsteps and explore the cinematic heritage of this wondrous island. Even though The Godfather is set in the real-life hilltop town of Corleone, the director Francis Ford Coppola chose to film in other medieval Sicilian villages as he felt that Corleone was too urbanised. Corleone, the supposed birthplace of character Don Corleone so memorably played by Marlon Brando, is still worth visiting. Bus tours leave from the island’s capital of Palermo, an hour and a half away.

The Godfather House, also known as the Corleone Museum, is an atmospheric early 19th-century building on Via Candelora that depicts typical village life where Don Corleone grew up. Corleone’s Anti-Mafia Museum is a fascinating look at the history of the terrifying Cosa Nostra crime syndicate. We flew into the west coast sea-port city of Trapani, famous for its salt plains dating back to the Phoenicians over 2,700 years ago. The plane passed over the mountaintop village of Erice which, with its winding streets and sweeping sea views, could be mistaken for that Cote d’Azur beauty, Eze.

At the top of Erice lies the picturesque 15th-century church, Chiesa di Sant’Orsola, with its twin bells and large courtyard well.

In The Godfather Part III it’s used as the entrance to the convent where Al Pacino, playing Michael Corleone, meets Cardinal Lamberto and breaks down in tears as he confesses to ordering the murder of his brother Fredo.

The church is open to the public and has been hearing confessions since 1662. Surprisingly, the church displays no sign of any connection to The Godfather, although it is easy to imagine that the church has witnessed real-life confessions every bit as dramatic as Michael Corleone’s over the centuries. A great place to stay is the wonderful Baglio Soria Resort & Wine Hotel, a beautiful 16-room resort, 10 minutes’ drive from Trapani.

Our tastefully designed suite overlooked the resort’s own olive groves, vineyards and a lake. The glamorously situated pool is a quiet oasis of calm in the Sicilian summer sunshine with a lovely view of Erice.

We were warmly welcomed with a lively wine tasting of the resort’s own Firriato wine at the scenic Belvedere terrace, followed by a delicious dinner in its fabulous restaurant, housed in an imaginatively restored high-beamed 17th-century building. It was packed with well-dressed locals enjoying inventive dishes such as the memorable tart of marinated mackerel with cardamon ginger, soy sauce, roasted celery and steamed prawns with cuttlefish ink powder and the Amberjack tataki with Sicilian citrus fruits and tuna with wild fennel. Trapani is perfectly situated as the gateway to the enigmatic Egadi islands and it’s an easy 25-minute hydrofoil journey to the island of Favignana, the largest island of the archipelago. It is the perfect day trip.

The Cala Rossa and the Lido Burrone are two beaches worth exploring. They were full of friendly Sicilians and their well-behaved kids.

If you would like to live like a pampered aristocrat, then the Giardini Mon Plaisir boutique hotel is the perfect spot to stay in Trapani. For it was formerly the home of the distinguished nobleman and landowner Baron Altavilla.

His charming grandson, Agostino Adragna, has transformed the 19th-century villa into a stunning palazzo with four elegant bedrooms and two lovely suites. It provides an authentic Sicilian experience with impeccable service. The vibe is laid-back and family friendly, plus there’s a lush garden and beautiful kidney-shaped swimming pool – much needed in the sizzling summer heat.

From there it was an hour-long car journey to the bustling city of Palermo. The Grand Hotel et des Palmes, newly restored to its Liberty splendour is the perfect hub from which to explore Palermo’s cinematic gems.

During Richard Wagner’s sojourn at the Grand Hotel in 1882, he found the inspiration to complete his final masterpiece Parsifal. The gorgeous Wagner suite still has the grand piano that the composer used to score the last act of the opera. It was a gift from his father-in-law Franz Liszt. Parsifal’s beautiful arias resonate through the hotel as breakfast is served in the beautiful ground-floor dining room.

Given the splendour of the surroundings, it felt only natural that so many guests were partaking in a Champagne breakfast.

A Godfather connection can be found within the Grand Hotel et des Palmes’, but this time it’s not of the cinematic kind.

Salvatore “Lucky” Luciano, widely considered to be the father of modern organised crime in the United States, once conducted his business here too. While Don Corleone died of a heart attack in his garden, Luciano died of a heart attack at Naples airport, where he had travelled to meet a movie producer considering a biopic of his life. From the delightful Grand Hotel et des Palmes, it is a short walk to the dramatic 12th-century Cathedral Monreale. With its mix of styles from Gothic to medieval, Arabic to neoclassical, it is a must-see. The charming Grand Hotel et des Palmes concierge team arranged opera tickets at the spectacular Teatro Massimo, scene of the dramatic climax of The Godfather Part III. It is here where Al Pacino come to hear a performance of Cavalleria Rusticana.

As Pacino is walking down the steps with his daughter, she is gunned down, dramatically dying in her heartbroken father’s arms.

Decades later, the opera house remains unchanged and just as atmospheric. As we walked down the same steps, a local newlywed couple were recreating the scene with the bride collapsing joyfully into the arms of her new husband.

The Florio restaurant on a beautiful terrace overlooking the Gulf of Palermo has stunning views. The powerful Florio family was the Corleone family of its day, albeit their wealth was earned legitimately.

They had vast estates and a lucrative tuna facility at Favignana. Their former home in the suburbs of Palermo, Villa Igiea – where the Florio restaurant is situated – is now the best hotel on the island and owned by the Rocco Forte Hotels group. It is often said that the better the view the worse the food. The Florio bucks that trend with mouth-watering dishes. The Villa Igiea is a listed building, so has maintained many original features such as the beautiful leather doors, the majestic painted walls in the conference room designed by Basile and its spectacular chandelier.

The refreshing beauty products in the rooms are by Irene Forte Skincare. Billed as ‘the Mediterranean diet for the skin’, its ingredients such as apricot, orange flower and hibiscus are all sourced around the island. This hotel is fit for any A-List star and has welcomed guests as disparate as Greta Garbo, Paul Newman, Grace Kelly and Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon

Earlier this year, Villa Igiea played host to Harrison Ford. The cast of the latest instalment of the Indiana Jones franchise – Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny – spent a month filming in and around Trapani and nearby Cefalu during which time Harrison Ford was resident at the Villa Igiea.

He was known to have a nightcap at the wonderfully atmospheric Igiea Terrazza Bar with its beguiling frescoes. Luckily, Harrison didn’t do any flying manoeuvres into any local golf clubs, although he did accidentally leave his credit card on nearby Mondello Beach. It was discovered by a German tourist who handed it into the police, who were later pictured reuniting Ford with his MasterCard. Priceless!

But Indiana Jones was not the only production in town – series two of the HBO hit The White Lotus also took over the Terrazzo bar for 24 hours and filmed a swanky dinner scene where Jennifer Coolidge, the series’ self-confessed ‘insane alcoholic’, suffers a meltdown over her cheating husband. Our cinematic journey continued past Cefalu and on to key locations for The Godfather in the medieval villages of Savoca and Forza d’Agro, both of which appear unchanged from when filming took place in 1972.

These pretty hilltop villages stood in for the town of Corleone. In the film, Al Pacino’s character, Michael Corleone, flees the States after being caught up in a mafia war between rival mob families. He takes refuge in Sicily where he falls in love with a beautiful local woman, Apollonia Vitelli – his future wife. Savoca features in some of the most iconic scenes for this part of the plot. The village’s Bar Vitelli is where Corleone first meets Apollonia’s father. He’s the owner of the bar and Corleone returns to the watering hole in a later scene to ask for his permission to marry Apollonia. Bar Vitelli is an atmospheric place for a granita and a chance to be immersed in the lore of The Godfather. It is a steep 10-minute walk up to the 15th-century Church of San Nicolo in Savoca, the filming location of the Sicilian wedding scene of Michael Corleone and Apollonia. It is open to visitors with a suggested donation of a euro. At the back of the church are the two simple wooden chairs on which Al Pacino and his bride sat.

Just like Al Pacino and Diane Keaton in The Godfather Part III, we arrived by train at the spectacularly located town of Taormina. Al Pacino and Diane Keaton, playing his second wife Kay, are pictured at the Art Nouveau Taormina-Giardini railway station at the start of their journey to explore the Corleone family history.

Taormina is the home each June of the famous international film festival, which hosted a special 50th-anniversary screening of The Godfather this summer in the presence of Francis Ford Coppola. The film festival has always brought the stars and little wonder when the spectacular 2,400-year-old Greek amphitheatre is the venue for the major film premieres here, with Mount Etna in the distance as a backdrop.

In fact, when Apocalypse Now Redux premiered in 2001, Mount Etna actually erupted in full sight of those in the amphitheatre. Unlike the Venice Film Festival, it is easy for tourists to get festival tickets. Coppola was not the only filmmaker in town. The second season of White Lotus took over the San Domenico Palace hotel in Taormina with a cast that includes the awkward coupling of Will Sharpe and Aubrey Plaza, with Meghann Fahy and Theo James playing a kinky married couple. The San Domenico Palace hotel is steeped in movie lore. Greta Garbo was a Taormina regular in the 1960s and 1970s and the reclusive actress would no doubt approve of the tasteful restoration of the former 14th-century monastery. The famous closing scene of Antonioni’s masterpiece, L’Avventura, was shot on the hotel’s scenic terrace overlooking the ever-dramatic Mount Etna. The 80s French classic, The Big Blue, also filmed here.

At the hotel’s exquisite Principe Cerami restaurant – where several breakfast and dinner scenes from The White Lotus were filmed – the award-winning Etna-born chef Massimo Mantarro serves up mouth-watering locally sourced dishes such as braised ox cheek with Sicilian vermouth, juniper from Etna, mashed potatoes and white truffle, followed by veal, Avola almonds, spiced chutney and grilled pumpkin, finished by a selection of Sicilian cheeses and honey, mead and pollen. The hotel’s Bar & Chiostro Lounge is a captivating place to have a cocktail themed around the history of the hotel.

I tried the vodka-based Jealousy and Mandolin 23, named after an infamous event in the hotel’s history, when a furious row broke out between hotel guests Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, with the diva smashing a mandolin over Burton’s head. Such a scene would not be out of place in White Lotus. The spectacular pool was the backdrop for several entertaining scenes in the series. While the pool looks divine and so inviting, the scenes were filmed in January and February this year when it was uncharacteristically chilly. Local stand-ins were used to save the cast from freezing in the water. Jennifer Coolidge has a memorable La Dolce Vita style Vespa ride down to the Bay of Taormina where she has a romantic dinner on the beach. The best private beach here is at the Villa Sant’Andrea, a truly wonderful Belmond hotel, that was originally built by an aristocratic family in 1919 and has a stunning setting in a lush and secluded tropical garden.

The hotel lives up to its boast of enchanting guests since the 1950s, with a stay in this beach residence being ‘like reuniting with long lost friends’.