Posts Tagged: Corleone

Follow Godfather character Michael Corleone into Sicily

Under the original "Itala Pilsen" sign, Michael Patrick Shiels sits with Lorenzo Motta at Bar Vitelli's.

Rookie mobster Michael Corleone, in Mario Puzo’s book “The Godfather,” is sent in exile from New York to hide out in Sicily. In the resulting Academy Award-winning movie, director Francis Ford Coppola chose the tiny village of Savoca – population 89 – as the location shoot for those old world scenes starring Al Pacino. Many of them were filmed over a six-week period on the patio of Bar Vitelli, Savocaa’s small, cliff-side café near the location of the church in which Corleone marries Apollonia Vitelli – the daughter, in the story, of the cafés owner.