‘The Godfather’ descended on a tiny Sicilian village, and it’s never been the same | CNN

EDITOR’S NOTE: On Location is a CNN Travel series exploring the destinations that star in some of the world’s most famous movies and television shows. When Francis Ford Coppola cast Enza Trimarchi as an extra in “The Godfather” in 1971, the 22-year-old seamstress had no idea she was taking part in something that would change her hometown and define it for decades. Trimarchi appeared in a key Sicilian sequence: the wedding of mafia-boss-in-waiting Michael Corleone and Apollonia Vitelli, filmed in the hilltop village of Savoca. For her, the arrival of Coppola and the film’s star Al Pacino, marked the end of adolescence in a place where life had changed little for centuries. “I was approached by one of Coppola’s crewmen who asked if I wanted to work,” Trimarchi, now 76, tells CNN. “So many people from all over the province had come to be selected. I was enthusiastic, so young. There was nothing in Savoca, we had no running water and drank the cistern’s rainwater. We didn’t even have a television.” More than 50 years later, Savoca — where fewer than 100 people live — remains closely tied to the film. Of the Sicilian locations used for Michael Corleone’s e