Sicily is a place where you can enjoy unique experiences and also a destination where millions of travellers arrive every year to discover the settings of films shot across its cities, countryside and seaside towns, from a stop in one of the small village bars above Taormina, to taste a lemon granita in the very place where Michael Corleone asks for Apollonia’s hand, to the backdrops of major Italian and international television series.

The film locations in Sicily give you the chance to explore each destination with a different eye, reliving the settings that have made several pictures iconic over the years, also because the island with all its peculiarities has offered the camera unrepeatable environments ranging from historic centres, to aristocratic residences, to villages where time seems to have stood still.

In this guide we are going to discover the places that hosted productions far apart in period and genre, and for each area we look at the main sets together with the practical information you need to reach them and to recognise what the shooting altered compared to reality.

Palermo and Its Province: From the Baroque of The Leopard to Tornatore’s Bagheria

In 1963 Luchino Visconti brought Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel to the screen and created the most sumptuous chapter of this map with The Leopard. The ballroom sequence was filmed over several weeks in the frescoed halls of Palazzo Valguarnera Gangi, in piazza Croce dei Vespri, a residence still inhabited by the family that owns it and open to visitors only on particular occasions. The summer home of the main characters was instead identified in an eighteenth century villa on the western outskirts of the city.

Donnafugata, the village that welcomes the Salina family in the novel, does not exist in the real place names of the island and took on the appearance of Ciminna, a hill town some forty kilometres from the regional capital, where the mother church appears in the thanksgiving scene and preserves the look it had back then. Filming in the city itself moved through the Kalsa district, piazza della Rivoluzione and the interiors of the church of the Gesù, places you can comfortably visit while you are in Palermo.

A century of history later and a few kilometres further east, Giuseppe Tornatore built a substantial part of his work around Palermo. Bagheria appears in several titles, from Cinema Paradiso (1988, Academy Award in 1990) to the sequences of Malèna (2000), and its eighteenth century villa decorated with grotesque figures is one of the most singular sets on the island, used by Marco Bellocchio as well in The Wedding Director (2006).

In the mountainous inland area of Palermo, Palazzo Adriano instead preserves the square that in the story of the boy and the projectionist stands for the centre of the imaginary town of Giancaldo in Cinema Paradiso. The fountain and the façades of the two churches facing the same space have remained unchanged, and the municipality has set up a small museum dedicated to the shooting. Other sequences of that film were shot in Cefalù, Castelbuono and Termini Imerese, while the ruins of Poggioreale, abandoned after the Belice earthquake, return in several of the director’s pictures as a landscape of decay.

The Godfather Villages Between Savoca and Forza d’Agrò

Around the saga of the Corleone family a misunderstanding has taken hold that has lasted for half a century, since the village that gives them their name appears in no shot at all: the production judged it too altered compared with the period of the story and looked elsewhere for villages able to convey the Sicily of the 1920s.

The choice fell on the villages perched behind Taormina, and Savoca became the place where Michael and Apollonia meet in The Godfather (1972). The bar that appears in the scene of the request to the girl’s father still exists, keeps its original sign and furnishings and still serves granita: it is the famous Bar Vitelli. The church where the wedding is celebrated is reached on foot along the lane that crosses the historic centre, and the full walk takes around an hour.

A short distance away, Forza d’Agrò provided the glimpses of the village seen from above and the stairway climbing towards the mother church, while the gorges carved by the Alcantara river, in the territory of Motta Camastra, appear in the exterior sequences. The third chapter of the saga, The Godfather Part III (1990), widened the shooting perimeter to include the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, where the closing sequence takes place, and an eighteenth century residence surrounded by citrus groves on the Fiumefreddo plain.

Those same Alcantara gorges returned to the screen in 2015 with Tale of Tales, the fantasy picture that Matteo Garrone presented at Cannes, setting the queen’s episode there. On the Etna side the volcano has supplied lunar landscapes to Italian and foreign productions for decades, from the costume films of the 1960s to the aerial shots of recent productions, and the road climbing towards the Sapienza refuge lets you reach by car altitudes where the panorama corresponds exactly to the one in the frames.

Film Locations in Sicily Among the Baroque of the Val di Noto

The area taking in Ragusa, Modica, Scicli and Noto has built up over the past thirty years a cinematic reputation intertwined with a televisual one, and the broadest phenomenon concerns precisely the small screen. The series Inspector Montalbano, adapted from Andrea Camilleri’s novels, placed the imaginary town of Vigàta in a geography that does not match the one in the books, spreading the inspector’s places between the town hall of Scicli, which houses the police station, and the seafront house at Punta Secca, now visited daily.

On the edge of Ragusa the castle of Donnafugata with its maze and its park appears in the same series and recurs in film productions of a very different kind, from Tale of Tales (2015) to costume dramas. The visit takes half a day and combines easily with the historic centre of Ragusa Ibla.

Twenty years earlier Tornatore had already brought the camera to this area for Cinema Paradiso (1988), the story of a fake talent scout travelling the island in search of faces to audition. Filming touched Ragusa, the mountain village of Monterosso Almo, the archaeological site of Morgantina in the province of Enna and the small harbour of Marzamemi, with the fishermen’s houses facing the square of the tuna fishery.

The stairways of Modica, the curved fronts of its churches and the narrow streets of the historic centre have hosted recent productions that take advantage of the compactness of the urban fabric, a condition that allows several settings to be filmed within a few hundred metres. The greatest advantage for anyone planning a film itinerary in this area lies in the short distances between the four main towns, which are easily reached by car.

Syracuse, Agrigento and the Southern Coast

With its pale paving and the baroque façade closing off the perspective, the cathedral square of Ortigia is probably the most photographed Sicilian urban setting in cinema. In 2000 the sequences of Malèna were shot there, the film starring Monica Bellucci in which the main character walks through the gaze of the townspeople, and filming extended as far as the seafront promenade, the inner streets of the island and some stretches of coast between Noto and Avola.

The same production took the camera to the limestone cliff sloping down towards the sea in the territory of Realmonte, a white terraced formation that has become the set of numerous pictures over the years and is now subject to access restrictions for conservation reasons, which are worth checking before planning your visit.

On the western coast, between Trapani and San Vito Lo Capo, the salt pans with their windmills and the beach of Macari appear in Everybody’s Fine (1990), the film by Giuseppe Tornatore with Marcello Mastroianni, whose character leaves the island to reach his children scattered across Italy. The sunset light on the basins remains one of the most recognisable landscapes on the Tyrrhenian side and draws photographers every evening along the road running beside the Stagnone lagoon.

In the inland area of Agrigento the birthplace of Luigi Pirandello and the clay landscape around Porto Empedocle recur in the adaptations of his works, while the Valley of the Temples has provided the backdrop for documentaries and for films set in classical antiquity. If you reach this area you can combine both routes even in a single day, given that the Pirandello sites are about ten kilometres from the valley.

Shooting on the Smaller Islands and the Contemporary Sets That Relaunched Sicily

Among the places Sicily has lent to cinema we cannot fail to mention its islands, some of which are imprinted on iconic pictures such as Il Postino (1994), the celebrated film Michael Radford made with Massimo Troisi, which tells of the exile of a Chilean poet on an island in the gulf of Naples, although filming largely took place on Salina, in the Aeolian archipelago. The beach of Pollara, set inside a collapsed crater, and the little harbour of Rinella are the main settings, while the main character’s house was purpose built and later dismantled.

Other islands in the archipelago hosted celebrated productions of the neorealist period: Stromboli (1950) by Roberto Rossellini gave the film both its title and its setting, while Vulcano was in the same period the stage of a rival production. At Acitrezza, on the coast near Catania, Luchino Visconti had already filmed La Terra Trema in 1948, the adaptation of Verga’s novel, using local fishermen in place of professional actors.

In recent years international film production has rediscovered the island on a wide scale, for instance with the shooting of The White Lotus (2022), the HBO series set in 2022 between Taormina, Cefalù, Palermo and Noto, after which a documented rise in bookings from English speaking markets was recorded. Considerable interest was also aroused by the series adaptation of The Leopard (2025, Netflix), filmed between Palermo, Catania and the countryside of the interior.

One more mention goes to the latest blockbuster Sicily has hosted: The Odyssey, which Christopher Nolan brought to Italian cinemas in July 2026. During production the director and his cast occupied the Egadi archipelago for around seven weeks, identifying Favignana as the Ithaca of the Homeric tale.

The castle of Santa Caterina, which stands over the highest point of the island and is reached on foot along the path climbing up from the town, hosted the palace sequences played by Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway, served by a constant coming and going of helicopters and by a cableway installed for the occasion and dismantled once shooting was over. The fishing harbour was instead converted into an ancient Greek landing place with a dozen scenographic ships moored there for weeks, while the waters around the island and the rock of Preveto appear in the sea sequences.

If you want to know about every film shoot carried out in Sicily over the years, you can also consult an updated list of productions and of the places involved held by the regional Film Commission, while several municipalities have set up marked routes with panels showing the corresponding film frame.

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