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.
