Captain Corelli's Mandolin

On the Ionian island of Cephalonia during the Second World War, the doctor's daughter Pelagia falls in love with Captain Antonio Corelli, an Italian officer of the occupying garrison who leads his men in an opera club and plays the mandolin. The island is real and central: the capital at Argostoli where the Italians are based, the port of Sami, Mount Aenos above the villages, and the coast where the fisherman Mandras swims. History closes in with the German massacre of the Italians in 1943 and the great earthquake of 1953.

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

inferred The 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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