“Any family who hides the boy Vito,” yells a man with a shotgun standing on the church steps “will regret it!” Dawn is breaking in the frightened village. Meanwhile, the hunted child makes his getaway under the noses of the pair of hunters, and they are disguised literally as hunters in their rustic corduroy suits and caps. Vito, hidden in a basket carried on the back of a donkey could be in a blasphemous re-enactment of the flight into Egypt to escape the slaughter of the innocents. The animal clatters in front of the church with a goat companion and exits down one of the alleys flanking the church.
Many years later Vito has returned, taken vengeance on his family’s killer and stands on the steps of the same small Baroque building as the tiny piazza fills with a Palm Sunday congregation spilling from
la chiesa. In his arms the multiple murderer holds his youngest son Michael as another donkey saunters by. Indeed all his natural children are present including the doomed Sonny and Fredo on this trip back to the old country.
The same church appeared briefly in the previous film in the trilogy for just a few seconds, but such is its strangely powerful presence it seems to symbolise a whole idea of a village, an archetype of superstitious rural Sicily itself as the fugitive Michael strolls past in care of two bodyguards dressed as hunters with guns, just like his father’s tormentors. “Corleone.” one of them declared in a previous shot, the one who will later betray him, waving in a short montage of the place Michael has hiked to see, the hard but beautiful sun drenched land his father was born in and fled from and where he will spend a dangerous idyll, the village the mob clan was accidently named after on Ellis Island in New York. We see it one last time in Part III when many years later Michael and his ex-wife Kay visit Corleone once more, this time a joyful wedding bursts from the church as they arrive, an ironic reflection of their disastrous union.
This church however, which appears only briefly in five shots in a trilogy of films made over a twenty year period is not where the film makers would have us believe it to be. This only architectural constant in all three Godfather films is not in Corleone, now a large, ugly, overdeveloped modern looking town, but in Forza d’Agro, a tiny medieval hill village perched 1377 feet up on a coastal cliff overlooking the Ionian Sea.
To the north are the Straits of Messina and the mountains of the toe of Italy, Calabria. To the south is the stunning coastal holiday resort of Taormina. Across the valley to the North West also perched on a hill is the even smaller settlement of Savoca where the majority of the Sicily scenes were filmed. Behind the town steep hills rise up to Monte Kalfa where goatherds sing across misty landscapes to each other.
Straits of Messina
Monte KalfaYou see nothing of these views in any of the three films however. Co-writer, director and producer Francis Ford Coppola brought his cast and crew all the way to Forza d’Agro to focus almost entirely on one mid shot of the church of Santissima Annuziata e Assunta, and for these brief moments the building exemplifies a mythical ideal, it’s decorative scrolls, flaming urns, scallop shell and winged doors and windows all typical of Italian Baroque architecture.
For me watching THE GODFATHER and THE GODFATHER PART II over the years it had become an icon (of the appalling 3rd movie the kindest thing to say is that it should never have been made). Who knows why we chose such icons, places which so intrigue us when seen in a film, painting or photograph? In mediaeval times vast populations would risk their lives to make arduous journeys to distant places to gaze upon and worship the bones of some saint (of usually dubious provenance). In April, wrote Chaucer, “Then do folk long to go on pilgrimages” so in April, pricked by Nature to ramp and rage I made my own pilgrimage to Forza d’Agro to see the place myself, a stone and brick star in two of the greatest films to be produced in the United States in a decade which saw an embarrassment of cinematic riches flow from its shores.
When I arrived I was lucky, there were no cars parked outside the church, a rarity I discovered. I had the place pretty much to myself as I strutted along the small flight of steps just as the hunters had. I imagined Robert De Niro standing here in that busy sun drenched shot, jutting out his jaw in imitation of Marlon Brando, dressed in his flashback Sunday best surrounded by palm waving extras and the donkey trotting by.
I went into the church, nobody there. The interior seemed huge; the façade of the building, hemmed in on its tiny piazza is deceptively compact.
Built apparently in 1707, architect un-named or unknown, to replace the previous one built in the 400’s which, this being Sicily, collapsed in an earthquake. There was an organ loft and a sculpture of Santa Caterina d’ Alessandria. I imagined the American cast and crew wandering round the place too, out of curiosity amid the tedium of setting up a scene for the Technicolor camera. I said a silent thank you for the pilgrimage to the god I didn’t believe in and went outside to study the “reverse shot”, the scene you never see, from the point of view of the hunters, of Al Pacino and De Niro and Diane Keaton in Part 3.
Reverse shotI could picture Coppola standing beside Gordon Willis’s camera in the piazza surrounded by the usual assortment of crew watched by the two little winged angel faces carved from tuffa above the church door. On one of the piazza walls was pasted a funeral announcement. A local lady had been sent off from the church the previous week. She was just fifty five but in the already fading photograph she looked much older possibly through illness or a hard life up here on the mountain, certainly there are no shops in Forza d’Agoa apart from a little pharmacy. The other businesses were hotels and restaurants and a single bar and gelateria.
I spent the night in the village and after a gigantic meal even Coppola or Brando couldn’t have finished I strolled round listening to the frogs and crickets croaking and chirruping in the valleys below and an owl hoot loudly from the steeple of the other main church in the settlement. I had to leave early in the morning to head back to Palermo, a journey which took all day. It was pouring with rain while I waited at the station in Sant ‘alleseo Siculo after exploring the deserted beach. High above me on its peak Forza d’Agro appeared and disappeared through drifting clouds of mist and drizzle with its church pretending to be Corleone, the one I’d come all this way to see. The train arrived and I looked up for one last time but the village had vanished. It was the day after my fiftieth birthday.
Piazza Giovanni XXIII
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