Corleone, Palermo

With all the money that the European Union has poured into Sicily, it is now easy to speed around the island on good, modern roads. But when old Cliffie lived there, aging Fiat buses were trundling along narrow hillside roads on their slow journeys into the interior. Sweltering in the Sicilian heat, keeping a watchful eye on the dark-suited men with a 'lupara' (shotgun) casually draped over a shoulder, you could take a bus to Corleone, home town of the fictional Corleone clan in Coppola's Godfather trilogy. In the old days, a hundred silent eyes would watch as you got off the bus, the click of the dominoes would stop as you parted the bead curtains of a bar, the collective intake of breath would be let out only when your accent gave you away as a foreigner.