go to the mattresses

It was the big tour day!  And it was fantastico. To recap: M and I are on holiday in Italy. Our route through Sicily has been created with the suggestions of a wonderful travel agency in Canada aptly called “Quench” but we are driving on our own, except for two scheduled tours. 

We were again steadily changing elevation, this time in our tour guide, Vitorio’s car, rising high above the sea on switchbacks. M and my kids are huge movie buffs, and a favorite film is The Godfather. Vittorio was driving us to Savoca, the tiny mountaintop village where Michael Corleone hid in exile and where he met and married the beautiful Appolonia. Savoca is at the top of a perilous peak approachable only by a goat path road that winds around like a child’s mindless scribble. Vittorio, a local, drove always with one hand while gesturing to us with the other; this so even as he remarked at a passing truck “woo-a, that was a close”. And he nevertheless expressed amazement at Coppola choosing to shoot in that remote, hard to reach village recalling the antiquated cargo and cameras from that age of film.

The view of the sea far below was stunning, as was the revelation that we were being invited to order drinks and granita, (a Sicilian iced dessert), in Bar Vitelli, the actual bar where Coppola filmed Michael convincing the father of Appolonia, that his intentions were honorable. 

Vittorio told us the villagers were the extras, including his grandmother, during that thrilling time in Savoca 53 years ago. Myself, I couldn’t stop thinking about our movie aficionados back home and how I’d love to show them this curious exotic world we’d time-travelled into. Honestly, so many in my family can recite The Godfather from Vito Corleone’s first, “Why did you go to the police? Why didn’t you come to me first? To Michael’s final “Don’t ask me about my business, Kay.”

 Next Vittorio drove us even higher up some more goat paths (ineptly translating to English for us, he mistakenly called them “roads”) which were made of glassy volcanic stone, to the church Michael and Appolonia were wed. He showed us the now tattered robe, hanging (unprotected) on the church wall, that the preist in the movie wore. The priest’s red prayer book, also a prop in the actual movie (presumably rather valuable for this reason alone) lay on a chair like a discarded pamphlet for us to pick up and leaf through.

It was difficult to believe there was civilization any further up the mountain, but Vittorio drove us still higher yet. Our ultimate, even more precarious, destination felt like a village out of a Dr. Suess story, the breeze circling up over our heads in a place close to heaven while the beach and bars beckoned far, far below. M was already texting our kids his photos and exchanging famous Mario Puzo lines.

This tour had all the intensity of “going to the mattresses” coupled with a perfectly reasonable apprehension of “sleeping with the fishes.”