Sicily & America¶
Two countries, two palettes, and an immigration story that runs in both directions.
The founding wound¶
The trilogy begins, chronologically, with a murder in Sicily in 1901.
Nine-year-old Vito Andolini's father is killed for an insult to Don Ciccio. His brother is killed for swearing revenge. His mother puts a knife to Ciccio's throat and is shot for it. The boy is put on a ship.
At Ellis Island a clerk misreads the tag and enters the town he came from as his surname. The family name is a bureaucratic error.
That opening — ten near-wordless minutes in Sicilian at the start of Part II — is the trilogy's foundation, and it establishes the terms:
- The state offers no protection and no justice
- The only available justice is personal, and it takes thirty-four years
- Everything the Corleone family becomes is an attempt to be the authority that was absent in 1901
What Sicily actually is in these films¶
Not a homeland. A country you escape and cannot escape.
Vito flees it as a child, returns in 1925 to kill an old blind man, and never goes back. Michael is sent there in 1948 and it takes his wife. He returns in 1979 and it takes his daughter. He dies there.
Three generations, and the island collects on every one of them.
The Sicilian sequences are also the only stretches of the trilogy shot in daylight. Gordon Willis photographs Sicily blown-out, golden, almost overexposed — in violent contrast to New York's amber-black interiors. See Cinematography.
That looks like romance and functions as exposure. In New York the Corleones operate in rooms with the shutters closed. In Sicily there is nowhere to hide, and both of the trilogy's assassinations of women happen in open sunlight.
The assimilation ladder¶
The family's Americanization is tracked across three films with unusual precision:
| Generation | Language | Business | Setting |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vito, 1901–25 | Sicilian | Neighborhood protection, theft, olive oil | Little Italy tenements |
| Vito, 1945 | Accented English | Gambling, unions, politicians | Long Island compound |
| Michael, 1958 | Unaccented English | Casinos, senators, Cuba | Lake Tahoe estate |
| Michael, 1979 | English and Italian | International finance, the Vatican | Rome, Palermo, New York |
Watch the music do the same climb: Sicilian folk song at the wedding → American swing at the Communion → grand opera in Part III. See Music.
And watch the food. Clemenza teaching Michael to make sauce for a lot of guys, in a kitchen, in 1945. By 1979 the family eats in restaurants where waiters bring things.
The assimilation completes and it does not save anybody. That is the trilogy's bleakest structural joke: the Corleones achieve everything the American immigrant narrative promises — money, respectability, a foundation, a papal honor — and arrive at a man dying alone in a Sicilian courtyard.
"I believe in America"¶
The first four words of the trilogy, spoken by the undertaker Bonasera in total darkness, before you can see him or anything else.
The full statement is worth taking seriously: Bonasera raised his daughter in the American way, gave her freedom, taught her never to dishonor the family. Two boys beat her. He went to the police, and to the courts, and the judge suspended their sentence and they walked out the same day.
And then I said to my wife, for justice, we must go to Don Corleone.
The film's entire economy is stated in ninety seconds. The Corleone family exists because the American institutions did not extend to Italian immigrants — no protection, no recourse, no credit. Vito's operation is a shadow state built for people the real state doesn't serve, and it is genuinely more responsive than the alternative, which is exactly why it becomes unkillable.
Bonasera is also the film's neatest closed loop: he asks for a favor in the first scene, and ninety minutes later Vito brings him Sonny's body and asks him to use all his skill so that his mother can see him.
The immigrant film hiding inside the gangster film¶
What Puzo actually cared about, and what he'd already written badly-selling books about.
The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965) — the novel he was proud of and nobody bought — is about an Italian immigrant family in Hell's Kitchen, with a fierce matriarch modeled on his own mother. It sank.
Four years later he put the same material inside a crime story and sold nine million copies. The family, the food, the fatalism, the way respect is currency: all of that is the earlier novel. The Mafia is the wrapper, and Puzo — who had never met a gangster — made it up out of hearing transcripts.
Which means the most convincing thing in The Godfather is the part that isn't research, and the most influential thing is the part that is.
Sicily as an actual place¶
The trilogy's Sicily was shot in Savoca and Forza d'Agrò, in the province of Messina — not in the town of Corleone, which had modernized past usefulness by 1971. Bar Vitelli in Savoca, where Michael asks for Apollonia's hand, still operates and still trades on it.
The real Corleone is a town of about 11,000 inland from Palermo, and it did produce a genuinely disproportionate share of Mafia leadership — the Corleonesi faction under Luciano Leggio, Totò Riina, and Bernardo Provenzano dominated Cosa Nostra through the 1980s and ran the campaign of bombings and murders that killed the magistrates Falcone and Borsellino in 1992.
Puzo picked the name in 1969, before any of that. The town now has an anti-Mafia museum and a complicated relationship with a novel that made it a metonym. See Real-World Mafia.