Sicily, Italy: Tour the real-life home of the mafia and The Godfather's filming locations

Travelling around Sicily, you get used to seeing images of "Don" Vito Corleone – OK, Marlon Brando – in a tux. Sometimes – such as in the gritty, market-laced Vucciria district of capital Palermo – he's depicted, graffiti-style, on walls and arched columns of piazza buildings. Mostly, however, in towns and cities across the island, he appears in shop windows and on shelves, his trademark scowl, slicked back hair and pencil moustache covering T-shirts, table mats, posters, lighters, figurines, liqueur bottles and even espresso cups with handles shaped like shotguns.

Brando will be forever immortalised as the grizzled mob patriarch in The Godfather, the Oscar-winning film based on the novel by Mario Puzo, whose story was inspired by real-life events wreaked by the Sicilian mafia. We hear all about the Cosa Nostra, and how fact and fiction collide, on our Splendid Sicilia tour, the first half of which has us based in Palermo, a city that was, from the mid to late-20th century, in the Mafia's grip.

While the spectre of organised crime still lingers here, things have changed dramatically in recent decades, thanks to the long-standing mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, a key figure in Sicily's anti-mafia fightback. Mafiosi have been locked up, corruption is reportedly down and tourism is on the up. Travellers are increasingly flocking here, seduced not just by Palermo's vibrant street life and magnificent cultural draws, but by the tours that promise to lift the lid on Sicily's murky Mafia connections and show off the various filming locations of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather flicks.

One morning, we set off through Palermo's rush-hour traffic to visit Corleone, the ancestral home of the fictional family from The Godfather saga. The journey takes us to Sicily's spectacular mountainous interior to the notorious medieval hill town that spawned the infamous, and brutal, real-life Mafia clans: the Corleonesi.

After the balmy hustle and bustle of Palermo, Corleone is eerily quiet and noticeably cooler (it's 542 metres above sea level). We warm up with a brisk walk through the sloping core of a town of 11,000 inhabitants, some of whom, mostly male, clearly like to talk. Groups of men, from 30-somethings to pensioners, chat, puff on cigarettes and exchange exaggerated hand gestures. Some gather at haunts such as Central Bar, where the walls are plastered with posters from The Godfather and newspaper clippings from 2008 when Al Pacino – who played Vito's Corleone's son Michael – made a pilgrimage to Corleone, from which his grandparents hail. Some older gents in Corleone don coppolas, the traditional flat caps of southern Italy that Pacino also wore on screen.

Down a side alley near the town hall, we find CIDMA (Centro Internazionale di Documentazione sulla Mafia e del Movimento Antimafia) Sicily's "Mafia and anti-Mafia" museum. Housed in a converted convent, it combines artwork, photographs and bleakly fascinating anecdotes from a guide, who reveals the roots and legacy of an organised crime syndicate that evolved in the 19th century.

Capitalising on the chaos and lawlessness of rural Sicily, gangs, akin to private armies, extorted pizzo – protection money – from landowners and peasants. The Mafia grew into a collection of affiliated clans or families known as the Cosa Nostra (roughly translated as "our thing") and spread throughout Sicilian society from businesses such as construction and waste management. It also became involved in drug trafficking, kidnapping and the bribery of politicians, judges and police. Waves of violence, turf wars and revenge killings of those who refused to be corrupted, sporadically ripped through the streets of Palermo and beyond, and CIDMA displays hard-hitting black-and-white photographs by celebrated photojournalist, Letizia Battaglia. It's a haunting collage of bloodied victims, funeral processions, the aftermath of car bombings, wailing wives and mothers and mobsters in handcuffs.