Tim Magee travels back in time to Puglia …
A long time ago in Sicily, an always-hungry lad – let’s call him Il Planko – ate a prickly pear. With the point-and-eat approach of a toddler, Il Planko would learn that, when foraging, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Especially foraging fuelled by bootleg Limoncello. The prickly pear (aka the exotic-sounding Indian fig) is a cactus. The first clue. The fruits are also called the bastardoni. Should’ve been my final clue. You can eat the little bastardoni, but only after you’ve peeled them. My plan was to while away the day over some random herby liquor in Bar Vitelli in Savoca, the Sicilian hamlet that became famous for playing the role of Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece, The Godfather. I spent it sucking granitas while coaxing near invisible needles from my mouth. Try saying tweezers with swollen lips.
Bar Vitelli is where Michael Corleone meets the father of Apollonia, his doomed bride-to-be. I had expected a touch of Little Italy mafia tat but the stone-flagged café looked movie-set perfect, with just a single grizzled framed note marking its connection with one of the greatest movies of all time.
Thirty years later, I’m in another small town overlooking the same Ionian Sea that I could spy from Savoca, this time though the arch of the boot. Surreally, I’m in Francis Ford Coppola’s hotel, Palazzo Margherita, watching a screening of The Godfather on the fourth of July. Godfather is as good a take as any on the American dream. I’m an audience of one in the palazzo’s handsome salon (inspired by another cultural legend, Luchino Visconti) until the lights go off and it becomes what the maestro deems a worthy marble-floored private cinema. A new kind of 5D. With an Old Fashioned from the family bar ten feet away, with its centerpiece Murano chandelier, I watch the screen, respecting Gordy Willis, The Prince of Darkness. Godlike cinematographer, his groundbreaking approach to lighting turns nearly every Godfather scene into a period piece that fades into the dark. And I’m fairly sure my lips pucker and tingle slightly at the scenes from Savoca.
Margherita is one of the Coppola Hideaways, a collection of five lottery-winning dreams, if lottery winners had sublime taste in everything. The family’s Italian hideaway is hidden in plain sight on the main street of Bernalda in the Basilicata region on the Puglian border, think Tuscany without the buses. Bernalda is not nine rooms, each one with more high-ceiling drama than the next, there are all kinds of corners to slope off to in the palazzo, from the restaurant with its communal table and open kitchen, to the frescoed cocktail bar in the inner sanctum to the public bar opening out onto the main street, with its portraits of greats from the Italian cinema that exploded in the ruins of Rome after WWII, alongside giants of Hollywood. Or, as the owner might say, his friends.
Bernalda is just ten minutes from long sandy beaches bordered by dense sky-scraping pine forests and the noisiest cicadas in the universe. Polishing this part of Italy’s boot means you are no more than an hour of dramatic driving from many of the south’s box-tickers. Zigzag from the golden streets of Lecce or white coastal fantasy-novel cities like Gallipoli, beetle between lidos, compare Adriatic waters to Ionian, or make the pilgrimage for a dip in Polignano a Mare. My accidentally movie-themed trip had started the night before in Matera. The third-oldest continuous human settlement in history (only Jericho and Aleppo are older), Matera looks like a lifesize archeological maquette of a dig: a warren of cave dwellings from 8,000 years before Jesus was a boy, churches that date back to the first notion of churches and hotels that are all carved from a single giant rock. I was there for Matera’s craziest night of the year, a bonkers saint’s day apparently dedicated to Saint Firework. The city lit up like the Apocalypse Now riverboat scene. Savoca had to wait 700 years to make it into the spotlight. Matera was 10,000 years old before its day in the sun as the setting for the opening scene of Daniel Craig’s farewell to Bond, No Time To Die.
But back to the main feature.
Coppola’s 19th-century palazzo has the polish of Italy’s posh northern cousins like Villa Feltrinelli but is more accessible, less precious. Family really is the theme. The director’s grandfather Agostin was from the town and referred to it as “Bernalda bella”. The genius behind Lost in Translation, Sofia, was married recently at Margherita, the spectacular onyx-tiled pool ready in the nick of time. Technically I’m a beneficiary of Sofia Coppola’s wedding, I mused, while floating in a Slim Aarons photograph, daydreaming under the blazing sun to a Puccini aria from speakers hidden in the kitchen garden, spurring dopey connections. Remembering that Carmine, Francis’ da, composed the music for Godfather’s wedding scene. Francis (we are friends now in my head) had stayed a few weeks before, could I leave a note asking what the bejesus happened to Pacino? When exactly did the mesmerising, near-silent, actingwith- his-eyes exemplar of restraint from Godfather and Serpico become the hoo-haa shouty parody of himself? Mostly I was dreaming of returning. Palazzo Margherita has a movie collection of 200 of Coppola’s favourites, moving picture versions of the Italian and Hollywood headshots in the front bar. Brando was 47 when he played the Don, five years younger than I am now.
Myself and Godfather were made in the same year. I’m not really into my birthday but I’m going to use the next biggie as an excuse to come back and mill through as much of the collection as possible, and act like an extended member of this family, which is the point