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A census in 1440 counted 5,145 people in Savoca. Two counts of the old centre, where the bar is, now give a hundred and 156. Four hamlets of the comune, Barone, Cannuli, Malerba and Rapone, have emptied completely, and Leonardo Sciascia described the centre as a ruin in 1962.
The bar occupies the ground floor of somebody else's house. Palazzo Trimarchi was put up in the fifteenth century by a branch of the Trimarchi family, rebuilt and enlarged in 1773, with three small balconies on carved corbels and a half-basement for wine. A crowd attacked it in July 1820 during the risings. By the second half of the twentieth century the owners had gone and the middle school had the floor above the bar.
The school has gone too. The floor above is a hotel now, and the bar is still a bar.
Coppola shot here in the summer of 1971, in the weeks after the New York schedule ended. The rooms upstairs are sold on it.
Houses in Savoca rarely touch. They stand apart, split by drops and broken up by rock, and elder grows in the gaps by itself. Savucu is the dialect word for elder, and a sprig of it is on the town's medieval arms.