As big fans of “The Godfather”, Corleone was naturally at the top of our list as the home town of practically all of Sicily’s big mafia bosses. According to four different sat navs in the car, it takes an hour and a half to get there. None of them is right. The country roads turn into dirt tracks several times.
The first two routes are completely closed. We ignore the third complete closure. After a few kilometres with potholes until just before Australia, the road quickly drops 40 cm across its entire width. We get over it, but definitely not back. After two and a half hours we arrive in Corleone.
Corleone is really beautiful with the narrowest and steepest of all the old towns we visit. Clotheslines hang from balconies over deep alleyways. Germany suffers from the “I’m renovating everything to death” complex. Everything here has been decaying for centuries. You can feel how poor Sicily is everywhere. The poverty and numerous foreign dominations by Greeks, Arabs, Normans and Bourbons are probably the main cause of the mafia, which was initially founded as a good thing.
A waterfall falls a good 20 metres over crumbling sandstone cliffs in a canyon above Corleone. Below it, 100 churches for 10,000 inhabitants doze in an endless Easter sleep. Ice cream is served in buns here. Old town palaces with Moorish foundations over 1000 years old, such as “The Godfather House”, invite you to travel back in time. The carabinieri drink a bored espresso on the market square.
On the long journey back, we make a stopover at the free natural thermal baths in Segasta. A small canyon full of reeds connects a warm river to two bathing pools with temperatures of up to 30 degrees. On the return journey, the sun sinks through stormy clouds into the sea.
Frank Woelky, born in 1973. Kitesurfer since 1998. Since 2006, I have been combining kitesurfing and web design on trips lasting several months off the beaten track.