Savoca
“Supra na rocca Sauca sta, setti facci sempri fa”
Savoca is a town of 1675 inhabitants in the province of Messina.
The town center city is located at 303 meters above the sea level and counts 106 inhabitants. The majority of the population live in the boroughs of Rina (498 inhabitants) and St. Francis of Paola (407 inhabitants) which lie near the Fiumara d’Agro in the valley d’Agrò.
Worth seeing
The Pentefur Castle
The History- and Ethno-anthropological Museum
The Catacombs located within the Capuchin Convent, with mummies of important citizens of Savoca.
Curiosity
This small town gets notoriety with the film “The Godfather” in 1972 by Francis Ford Coppola – the little bar where the character played by Al Pacino meets the father of his future bride still exists. Here and in the nearby village of Forza d’Agro almost all Sicilian scenes in the movie were filmed.
Savoca and “The Godfather”
In 1971 Francis Ford Coppola chose Savoca to shoot some scenes of the famous film “The Godfather” with a soundtrack that Nino Rota composed inspired by these places. Thanks to the film, famous throughout the world, Savoca jumped to the honor of the big screen with a presence in the country of famous actors like Al Pacino, Simonetta Stefanelli, etc. The film crew stayed for several weeks in Savoca immortalizing its most charming corners. Main scenes were shot in the church of S. Lucia (where they celebrate the marriage between Michael Corleone and Apollonia) and in the Bar Vitelli, that was the subject of several scenes, and the bar now exhibits numerous memories of the shooting, including photographic processing of the film. A small museum worth visiting.
The crypt: the mummies of Savoca
Built in the second half of 1600th century, the crypt contains 32 mummified bodies of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, of which 17 seat in the niches wearing the clothes of their era, and another 15 bodies are placed in crates and hand-crafted coffins.
The first mummy, identified with certainty, dates back to 1776, and the most recent coffin is from of 1876. The bodies in the crypt belong to priests, abbots, poets, judges - of some of them we know about their life and works. The process of mummification (which lasted 60 days), was called “natural drying”: it consisted in sprinkling salt and vinegar on the body, and then putting the body in the basement of the Cathedral Church – in this basement, thanks to the drafts of air, the natural drying of the body took place.
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