When I visited my family in Sicily, I asked to go to Corleone, but my family refused to take me. They told me that it was a "dead town", so I guess that the stories are true.

One of my favorite scenes in the movie that runs contrary to the book is the story of how Vito's name got changed. In the book, he took the name Corleone as a rare gesture of sentimentality. In the movie, it gets changed when he goes through Ellis Island, which I believe was FFC flipping the bird, for want of a better term, at the American bureaucracy that was so cold and indifferent to the immigrants that passed through there.