It's been a long time since I was last on a Greek island. There's something still unspoiled about them: simple architecture, plain but tasty food, limpid seas and near-empty beaches. We were already in Italy, halfway between Rome and Naples, so a drive to Brindisi and a ferry to Kefalonia seemed pretty straightforward.
My old friend John Hurt was filming there, playing the part of Doctor Yiannis in the film version of 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin' alongside Nicholas Cage and Penelope Cruz. As in all proper movies he'd been given a large villa to stay in, just outside the tiny port of Agia Efimia, just across the bay from Sami where most of the filming was taking place. The invitation from John and his partner Sarah to stay for a week was too good to miss. A visit to a local Italian travel agent gave us the unwelcome news that there was no room on the ferry for our car, but worse, all cabins and Pullman seats were now taken. The only tickets left were what is called 'deck passage'. What that means is you fend for yourselves, finding a space wherever you can to lay your head. Fifteen hours of this didn't seem immediately attractive. I phoned Sarah and said that with no accommodation I wasn't overly keen. She wouldn't take no for an answer. 'Buy a couple of lilos and sleep on them. You'll be fine and I'll be there to meet you. Just do it.' So we did. And watching the dawn come up over Igoumenitsa, our first port of call just down the coast from Albania, was magical. All the discomforts of the night faded as the brightening day allowed glimpses of the Greek coastline through the lifting mist.

The final approach to the port of Sami, our destination, was through the narrow strait between Kefalonia and Ithaca, which for the most part is between 3 and 5 kilometres wide. Ithaca was the kingdom of Odysseus, which he was unable to reach for ten years, as his voyage home from Troy took him and his men all around the Mediterranean basin before getting back to his patiently waiting wife, Penelope.

Sami sits snugly in a bay with a patch of coastal plain behind it, before the high mountains of Kefalonia rise steeply behind it. Both Kefalonia and Ithaca are mountainous, the highest peak on Kefalonia, Mount Enos, rises to 1,627 meters, over 5,000 feet.

Europe without frontiers finally seems to have arrived. Since leaving Ireland we'd driven through Wales, England, France, Italy and now we were landing in Greece and not once had anyone asked us for a passport or any kind of identification. Sarah was on the dockside to greet us as promised and within minutes we were being whisked up a gentle rise overlooking the Bay of Sami to where the filmmakers had built an entire village. A church, a kafeneion (a traditional Greek coffee house) a small piazza, several dwelling houses and of course the doctor's house where much of the story takes place. We found John sheltering from the heat in his air-conditioned trailer and after a quick hello we left him to his work. A couple of weeks earlier the temperature had risen to the mid-forties, absurdly hot, and John had been filming in his doctor's three piece woollen suit and a thick linen shirt. Now that's dedication to art.

Back through Sami and a chance to take in our surroundings. It's small enough and is centred on its sea front which is lined with restaurants, bars and ferry offices. Cafes serving espressos abound and most of them have seating areas right along the harbour wall, where you can watch the ferries coming and going. Big ones on their way to Italy, small ones that island hop an endless parade of people coming and going. It was in one of the ferry offices that I first discovered one of the vagaries of Greek ferries. We'd been told in Brindisi that they could only sell us a one-way ticket and that we'd have to buy the return in Sami. Reading the brochure for Med Link Lines in Sami I found the interesting fact that there was a 20% discount on the return trip if you had bought it along with the original ticket. Great, except they won't let you.

Before we went to the villa we stopped off for a coffee in what was once Café Dimitrios overlooking the harbour of Agias Efimia, which has now been renamed 'Captain Corelli's' in deference to the hero of the book that brought the movie to Kefalonia. The whole northern end of Kefalonia, centred on its regional capital, Sami, seems to be engrossed with the movie. It's probably the biggest event on the island since the earthquake of 1953 or the Italian invasion during the Second World War, which just happens to be the backdrop for the book. Whole wartime scenes were recreated using islanders and the Greek army. To many of the older inhabitants it brought back hard memories - watching German and Italian troops landing and marching through their island.

The book by Louis de Bernieres has become something of publishing legend. It's been on the best seller lists for five years, and achieved that long run of sales - now about one and a half million - largely through word of mouth. It's a love story and the wartime occupation of Kefalonia is its backdrop. There's a lot of people out there who have their own mental pictures of the characters and that includes me. When I first heard that the eponymous hero was to be played by Nicholas Cage, I just couldn't see it. But a look at some stills of him in his Italian military uniform had me persuaded. Everyone that I met on the movie was astounded at how well and how quickly he had learned to play the mandolin, which is an integral part of the character.

There's still some residual anger on the island, not just about who did what and to whom back in the early forties, but also with Louis de Bernieres' portrayal of the Greek partisans in his book. I had some sympathy with de Bernieres: it seemed to me that the history of those years was entirely dependent upon whoever was telling you about it. No doubt those were strange years. Both the Germans and the Italians kept a garrison on Kefalonia and when the Italians sided with the Allies, the Germans rounded up as many Italians as they could find on Kefalonia and shot them - four thousand of them in four days. A few escaped through the kindness of the Greeks and despite the fact that the Italians were briefly an occupying power there still seems to be some mutual Mediterranean affection.

Sarah had organised a large dinner party as a welcome for us. No Nicholas Cage, though, he'd finished a couple of days before we got there. What was very clear was what a happy crew this was and much of the praise for this went to John Madden, the director. The book is long, charming, erudite and entertaining. Somehow a moviemaker has to take 30-40 hours of reading and convert it into an hour-and-a-half of film. Inevitably subsidiary story lines get lost and discarded in the shortening process. That job went to scriptwriter Shawn Slovo who adapted the sprawling book with John Madden for the final script. But most of the discussion on set about the book was to do with the ending. In general Hollywood doesn't like unhappy endings and so the book's ending had to go. It never really worked for me, so I was delighted to hear that it had been changed.

Making a big budget movie on an island where everything they needed had to be imported made things difficult, yet, according to Kevin Loader, one of the movie's producers, it was worth it for the genuine feeling that the real landscape of Kefalonia provided. One day we went up to the set - known by some as Shepperton-on-Sea - to watch the filming of the festa celebrations at the old church. A Metropolitan and a couple of Greek Orthodox priests wandered around between takes, huge long beards and those splendid hats of office. All the Greeks on set were clustered around Irene Papas, the grande dame of Greek cinema. Whatever fame the other stars may have internationally, Irene Papas eclipses them all in Greece.

-oOo-

From John's villa you could see all of the Bay of Sami to the right and Ithaca on the left. I swear, it called to me; 'Visit me, visit me.' With John sleeping on one day after a night shoot, Susie, Sarah, my daughter Isabella and me did the Ithaca trip. The ferry from Sami takes about 45 minutes to get there and true to previous form we could only buy a one way ticket - 'You must buy the return ticket in Ithaca,' we were told firmly. About £20 paid for the car and the four of us and there we were standing on Odysseus' kingdom. It's tiny by kingdom standards, two big mountains rising out of the sea joined by a thin isthmus a couple of hundred yards wide, near which our ferry disgorged us.

The first task was to go to Vathi and buy the return ticket. Vathi is the island's capital and sits snugly in a deep horseshoe-shaped bay. A quick look at the tourist shops of Vathi and then, ticket in hand, off to the northern half where it's almost completely undeveloped. The road takes you back over the narrow isthmus and then starts to climb dramatically. After a few kilometres you have an aerial view over the Bay of Vathi several thousand feet below and the girls start to close their eyes as we go around hairpin bends with no guardrail and vertiginous drops to the ocean. At the top of this road the landscape changes to a slowly sloping plateau, gently falling like an escarpment to the northern coastline. This is Greece as it has existed for millennia. Odysseus would find it largely unchanged. The road wanders between tiny villages and in one of them Sarah made us stop. 'See that kafeneion? That's the one they modelled the set coffee shop on.'

It was beautiful in the way that pure artisan art can be. Faded red paint on the stucco front proclaimed it a 'Kafeneion' and inside we found an old lady, a counter across the far end, a few tables and some wooden chairs. She had a fridge, she pointed to it, so we had a couple of cold beers. It reminded me of the bar my grandmother used to run in our village in Italy back in the 1960s. Set in its time and tradition with no sops to modernity, it was totally charming.

Next door to the bar was a church with murals dating from the fifteenth century. An old man who was polishing the brasses for the forthcoming festa showed us around. He wouldn't take anything for his troubles, he just wanted to kiss the girls, which he did, more than once.

At the north of the island is a small group of houses where there is a restaurant called 'Polifemus' named after the Cyclops that Odysseus blinded. Sitting in its garden under the shade of the olive trees we had was, by a large margin, the best meal I've eaten in Greece. It was Greek food with a subtlety and deftness that is unusual. Greek food reminds me of German food; solid, dependable, but mostly unexciting. I was delighted to have my prejudices severely shaken.

Back in Kefalonia we watched a little more filming. The scene was the festa night and the young men strutted their stuff, dancing. Shades of Zorba. Standing at the edge of the set in the olive trees we watched a piece of history come alive, as goats climbed high into the olive trees and ate what they could reach, balancing on tiny branches. John looks perfect with his huge walrus moustache bestriding his upper lip. Spanish she may be, but Penelope Cruz makes a beautiful and believable daughter Pelagia, the love of Corelli's life.

It's possible that if the popularity of book extends to the movie, Kefalonia will change beyond recognition. Despite some pleas from locals to leave it stand, the set village came down in the earthquake scene and then was removed completely. What is left is the legacy of a big budget movie, plus the certain knowledge that a tourism boom is about to begin. In a way, I'm glad to have seen Kefalonia before the gold rush.