Savoca

Savoca sits fifteen kilometers north of Taormina, on a hill above the Ionian coast. The centro storico runs along the ridge in stepped lanes and balconied stone houses, with the Capuchin convent below it at the lower edge of the village and the castle ruin above at the highest point, the two anchoring the village from bottom to top. The convent's crypt holds thirty-seven mummified bodies of notables from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, preserved in a colatoio that desiccated the corpses with vinegar and salt.

In the summer of 1971, Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo arrived to film the Sicilian scenes of The Godfather here, after the original Corleone in Palermo province was judged too modern for the camera. The village's shape, a compact ridge with a church at one end and a bar in the lower piazza, gave the film both its wedding location and its courtship scene without need for another set. What draws people now is largely what drew Coppola then: a village small enough to read in a single walk, old enough to need no dressing.