Chapter 10% in

Pelagia

The village (Dr Iannis and Pelagia's house)

Chapter 1

The book opens in a Cephalonian village of goats, gossip and the doctor's crowded consulting room, where Pelagia keeps house for her widowed father. When the Italians requisition rooms, Captain Corelli is billeted here, and the small stone house becomes the stage for a love that grows over a shared table and a mandolin.

Chapters 1-3

inferredThe unnamed hill village where the doctor and his daughter live is drawn from the settlements of central Cephalonia near Sami; sited on the slopes above that eastern side of the island.

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Chapter 1225% in

Captain Corelli

Argostoli

Chapter 12

The island's capital is the seat of the occupation, where the easygoing Italians settle into a long, almost benign posting, drinking and singing while the war goes on elsewhere. Corelli's opera club, La Scala, belongs to this world of soldiers who would rather make music than war.

The occupation

explicitArgostoli, the real capital of Cephalonia, is the base of the Italian garrison Corelli belongs to; the town was later almost entirely destroyed in the 1953 earthquake and rebuilt.

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Chapter 2050% in

Dr Iannis

Mount Aenos

Chapter 20

The great mountain stands over everything in the book, the fixed natural fact beneath the human comedy and tragedy. Dr Iannis, writing his history of Cephalonia, reads the island's long memory into it, invasion after invasion, while up in such hills the resistance and its cruelties take shape.

The island

explicitMount Aenos, the real forested peak that dominates Cephalonia, rises over the island of the novel; its slopes hold the goats, the wild herbs the doctor uses, and later the andarte partisans.

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Chapter 675% in

Mandras

Myrtos Beach and the coast

Chapter 6

Before the war Pelagia is promised to Mandras, a handsome young fisherman who swims and dives in the clear Ionian water. He goes off to fight in Albania and comes back changed and coarsened, and the sea that once made him beautiful cannot give him back what the war takes.

Chapters 5-6

explicitThe island's dramatic coast, of which Myrtos on the north-west is the most famous stretch, is the sea world of the fisherman Mandras; the beach is a real and celebrated feature of Cephalonia.

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Chapter 30100% in

Captain Corelli

Sami (the harbour)

Chapter 30

When Italy surrenders in 1943, the Germans turn on their former allies, and thousands of the Italian garrison are executed on Cephalonia. Corelli is caught in the slaughter and saved only by the body of a friend falling over him, and the island's long idyll ends in one of the war's worst massacres.

September 1943

explicitSami, the real port on the east coast of Cephalonia, is the island's link to the mainland; the historical massacre of the Italian Acqui Division by German forces in September 1943 forms the black heart of the novel's war.

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