On the Road with Francis of Assisi

by Linda Bird Francke

  ON THE ROAD

  WITH FRANCIS OF ASSISI

  A Timeless Journey Through Umbria and Tuscany, and Beyond

  LINDA BIRD FRANCKE

  Random House · New York

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Maps

  1. Mozart Among the Giottos

  2. Lost in Perugia

  3. The Missing Letter in Spoleto

  4. The Old Rome

  5. Showdown in Assisi

  6. Clare’s “Prison”

  7. Peace March in Santa Maria degli Angeli

  8. Francis Gets His Marching Orders

  9. The First Tour to the Marches

  Photo Insert 1

  10. The Pope Has a Dream

  11. Desperately Seeking Francis and the Birds

  12. Clare Flees to Francis

  13. Eating Well and Tuscany’s First Hermitages

  14. Shrieking Swallows in Alviano

  15. The Marches Again—Green Fields, Blue Adriatic

  16. Finding Francis Along the Nile

  17. Cruising the Venice Lagoon

  Photo Insert 2

  18. Poor Francis

  19. Following Francis to Italy’s Boot

  20. The Beautiful Rieti Valley

  21. Touched by an Angel at La Verna

  22. The Painful Road Back to Assisi

  23. Agony in the Rieti Valley

  24. Hearing the Larks Sing

  Travel Notes

  Source Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books By Linda Bird Francke

  Copyright

  For Oona

  And all the places we will travel together

  INTRODUCTION

  I have wanted to write a book about St. Francis and St. Clare since my husband and I first went to Assisi some twelve years ago to see the Giottos. It was St. Francis’s basilica at one end of Assisi, and St. Clare’s pink and white basilica at the other end that captivated me, along with the story I heard there from a Franciscan sister that Francis had died in Clare’s arms. That turned out to be historically incorrect, but no matter. I was hooked.

  Other book projects intervened, and it was not until 2002 that I could return to Francis and Clare. A search of Amazon.com, however, revealed so many books about Assisi’s saints that I was discouraged. My agent, Lynn Nesbit, suggested a travelogue format, which, though a great idea, essentially eliminated Clare, who entered a convent at eighteen—and never came out.

  Francis, by contrast, crisscrossed Italy for twenty years, preaching peace and repentance in hill towns and valleys and withdrawing to the solitude of mountaintop hermitages, an astonishing number of which exist to this day. We followed him virtually everywhere he went, using his medieval biographies as our guidebooks and telling his story through the places we visited.

  Several of those books were written by his contemporaries and fellow friars, the most immediate being Brother Thomas of Celano, whose official biography of Francis was completed in 1229, just three years after Francis died, and expanded in 1246. We also drew from other contemporary, thirteenth-century biographies, including The Legend of the Three Companions, The Life of St. Francis of Assisi by St. Bonaventure, and the fourteenth-century epic The Little Flowers of St. Francis.

  Our journey with Francis was a glorious one, taking us to lakes and forests and twelfth-century churches and hermitages we never would have gone to without him. The art was unparalleled, the scenery spectacular, and the food, delicious.

  Like Francis’s, our adventure started in Assisi. I hope you will come along with us.

  Linda Bird Francke

  Sagaponack, N.Y.

  March 2005

  Francis of Assisi walked the length and breadth of Italy preaching between 1208 and 1225. We followed his footsteps by car, driving some six thousand kilometers to the cities shown in boldface on the map above, as well as to all the towns, hamlets, convents, and hermitages shown on the two larger-scale maps on the opposite page. The inset map shows the eastern corner of Egypt’s Nile Delta, where we followed Francis on his quest to convert the Muslim Sultan during the Fifth Crusade in 1219.

  The heart of Francis country comprises the regions of Umbria, the Marches, the eastern edge of Tuscany, and Lazio. The inset details the immediate surrounds of Assisi, his hometown and birthplace of the Franciscan movement.

  Francis’s body lay hidden for six hundred years deep under the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi. We listen to Mozart here among the Giottos.

  Spoleto’s beautiful cathedral, where we don’t find Francis’s famous handwritten letter to Brother Leo.

  The convent of San Damiano, whose little church Francis rebuilt after the cross there spoke to him. Clare would be cloistered here for forty-one years.

  Francis stripped naked and renounced his father right here in front of the Bishop’s Palace in Assisi’s Piazza del Vescovado.

  Gubbio is famous for the story about Francis taming the wolf—but more important, a family here saved his life.

  The Abbazia di Vallingegno is now an inn on the road to Gubbio, but in Francis’s time it was the Benedictine monastery of San Verecondo. The inhospitable monks here put him to work as a scullery boy.

  The skyscraping chapel at Pòggio Bustone, where Francis, standing on a rock, wrestled with his conscience.

  Francis turned from playboy to penitent and emerged a humble pilgrim from the chapel’s Grotto of Revelations.

  Francis preached to the birds here at Pian d’Arca, the simple and hard-to-find roadside shrine near Cantalupo.

  A fissure in the rocks at Sant’Urbano, one of many such crevasses in which Francis prayed and felt closest to the Lord.

  Francis fasted here on the Isola Maggiore in Lake Trasimeno for the forty days and nights of Lent.

  My husband didn’t.

  The lovely Tuscan sanctuary of Celle di Cortona, where Francis founded one of his first hermitages. He would write his Last Testament here near the end of his life.

  The Virgin Mary, crowned with a halo of electric lightbulbs, atop the vast church of Santa Maria degli Angeli near Assisi, which harbors Francis’s tiny chapel, the Porziuncola.

  A naked Francis fought devilsent lust by building a family out of snow at Sarteano, another early and primitive sanctuary. I gird myself to access the caves on my hands and knees.

  The modern Adriatic port of Ancona, whence Francis first sailed for the Holy Land and was shipwrecked instead.

  The gleaming travertine-paved Piazza del Popolo in Ascoli Piceno, with the imposing church of St. Francis in the background. Francis was mobbed when he preached in Ascoli.

  The incomprehensible pinnacle of San Leo, where Francis crashed a noble’s party and was given the mountain of La Verna.

  The runaway Clare thwarted her furious uncle at the monastery church of San Paolo delle Abbadesse near Assisi. This is how it looks now.

  A triumphant Muslim warrior in Fariskur, Egypt, where, during the Fifth Crusade, Francis offered to walk over hot coals to peacefully convert the Sultan. He failed.

  Francis recuperated from his Egyptian ordeal on the Isola del Deserto in the Venice lagoon. Here he decided to resign as head of the Franciscan Order.

  On a preaching tour of southern Italy, Francis summoned a crowd in Bari by ringing this bell, now enshrined here in the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. We ring it, too.

  Francis reenacted the first live nativity in a cave in this extensive, reconstructed sanctuary of Greccio. He also performed many miracles here.

  Francis received the stigmata in the roc
ky wildness of La Verna and lived thereafter in excruciating pain.

  His stone bed, strewn with pilgrims’ offerings, at the hermitage of Monte Casale, near Sansepolcro, where the weakened Francis rested on the way home from La Verna.

  The Pope ordered Francis to go to the important medieval city of Rieti for treatment of the eye disease he had contracted in Egypt. The Pope’s doctors failed.

  The tiny Chapel of the Magdalene at Fonte Colombo, a hermitage near Rieti, where another doctor vainly tried to cure Francis by searing his temples with a hot poker. BELOW: The Greek letter “Tau,” Francis’s symbol, was supposedly etched on the chapel’s window frame by Francis himself.

  The Porta Ovile in Siena, through which Francis was carried, mortally ill, to the nearby sanctuary of Alberino on his final journey home.

  The medieval church of San Stefano, in Assisi, whose bells rang spontaneously at the moment Francis died.

  1

  Mozart Amongthe Giottos

  ASSISI, where Francis and Clare are born and Francis spends his indulgent youth

  Assisi looks like an enchanted kingdom from the roads crisscrossing the Spoleto Valley. The small, medieval hill town hovers on the side of Mount Subasio, not so high as to seem inaccessible and not so low as to seem commonplace. The massive thirteenth-century Basilica of St. Francis rises above the city walls at the western end of the town and is visible from miles away, a luminous, milky beige by day, dramatically lit by night. The thirteenth-century Basilica of St. Clare lies farther down the hill, at the other end of Assisi, a smaller but no less imposing building whose striped façade of Subasio stone is pink and white.

  The approach to Assisi is tantalizing. The road climbs and curves, bringing us closer to the town’s walls, then circling us away. Up and up, then around, until we think that we must have missed Assisi altogether, that it was a fantasy after all, and then, finally, parking lots, one after another, filled with the jarring reality of cars and multinational tour buses.

  My husband, Harvey, and I are just two of the close to five million people who visit Assisi each year. Most are clergy and pilgrims from all over the world who come to pray in the birthplace of Assisi’s endearing—and enduring—native saints: Francis, Italy’s patron saint and the founder of three ongoing Franciscan orders; and Clare, Francis’s spiritual companion and the first and sainted member of his Order of Poor Ladies. The combination makes Assisi second only to Rome as an Italian pilgrimage destination.

  Almost as many visitors are tourists who come just to see the extraordinary early Renaissance frescoes in the Basilica of St. Francis by the leading artists of the time—the Sienese painters Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti; the Florentine Cimabue, whose portrait of a stark, suffering St. Francis in the lower basilica is the world’s most familiar, and accurate, image of the saint; and, of course, the incomparable early-fourteenth-century Florentine artist Giotto.

  Giotto’s twenty-eight larger-than-life frescoes of the life and legend of St. Francis in the upper church of his basilica are the most popular and perhaps the best-known narrative fresco cycle in the world. The familiar story marches around the walls: Francis, naked, confronting his father; Francis, preaching to the birds; Francis, expelling the devil from Arezzo; Clare bidding farewell to Francis after his death. On and on. One memorable evening my husband and I go to the basilica for a free, standing-room-only performance of the Mozart Requiem conducted by a Franciscan friar during which, unbelievably, I end up perching on a box of programs directly under Giotto’s famous depiction of Francis receiving the stigmata.

  Clare’s basilica used to be just as brilliantly frescoed, but no more. A stern German bishop had the frescoes obliterated in the seventeenth century to protect the Franciscan nuns cloistered there from any contamination by visiting tourists. The austere interior walls of Clare’s basilica still bear fragments of the frescoes, but they are all that remain, in the words of one Franciscan historian, “of a decoration that was once as abundant as that of San Francesco.”

  Frescoes aside, there is an overriding and alluring presence of Francis and Clare throughout the cobbled hill town. Both saints were born here, Francis in 1181 and Clare in 1193. And both are buried here, in their respective basilicas.

  I spend time in both their crypts, sitting in a pew and listening to the muffled and unceasing sound of the rubber-soled shoes of tourists and pilgrims alike on the stone floors. Few of those moving quietly around Francis’s stone sarcophagus know the dramatic events that overtook his remains after his death in 1226. His body was first kept in his parish church of San Giorgio, some say sitting up and visible to all, his eyes open and staring, his stigmata wounds prominently displayed.

  Whether that is true or not, what is undeniable is that four years after his death and two years after he was officially canonized as a saint, his body was transferred under heavy guard to his semiconstructed basilica on what had been known in Assisi as the Hill of Hell, where criminals were executed, which was quickly renamed the Hill of Paradise.

  The fear was so great that his body might be stolen for its limitless value as a source of relics by the marauding, rival hill town of Perugia, or simply by thieves, that his coffin was hidden, tunneled somewhere deep in the rock below the basilica, and the access to it sealed. His body would lie in that secret spot for the next six hundred years, until it was discovered in 1818.

  Few of the people gathered in front of Clare’s crystal coffin, looking somewhat uneasily at her realistic effigy clothed in a brown habit and a black cowl and displayed with darkened face, hands, and bare feet, are aware that her body, too, was kept at San Giorgio after her death in 1253, twenty-seven years after Francis died; that she, too, would be transferred, five years after her canonization in 1255, to her new pink and white basilica built on the foundations of San Giorgio. Clare, too, would lie hidden until her body was discovered in 1850 and placed some years later in the crypt.

  I have always been fascinated by the relics and artifacts people leave behind after their deaths, like the army of terra-cotta warriors chosen by Emperor Qin Shi Huang in China, or the rather gruesome slice of a seventeenth-century callus I saw enshrined in a church in Guatemala from the remains of Pedro Hermano, a Franciscan friar so devout that he walked only on his knees. The relics left behind by the saints of Assisi are an odd lot as well, and understandably spare, in that Francis and Clare chose to own nothing in life. What relics there are, however, are bookmarks to their lives.

  On a prior visit to Assisi, I had breezed through Francis’s relics displayed in the lower church of his basilica, having no idea of their significance. On this visit, having immersed myself in his legend, I find them fascinating.

  There is a letter Francis wrote in his own hand, one of only two in existence, giving his blessing to Brother Leo, one of his first and most faithful friars. Leo was so moved by the gift that he carried the increasingly fragile blessing next to his heart until he died, forty years later.

  Francis’s quest to convert the Muslim “Saracens” in the Holy Land, or be martyred trying, is represented by a silver-and-ivory horn given to him in 1219 by the sultan of Egypt. In what turned out to be a futile gesture, the horn was ceremoniously shown to Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s deputy prime minister and a Chaldean Christian, as an icon of peace by the Franciscan leadership in February 2003, when he made a high-profile visit to Assisi during the countdown to the Iraq war.

  Another treasured relic is the framed Franciscan Rule of Life, dated November 29, 1223, which Francis dictated to Brother Leo at a hermitage in the Rieti Valley and which still governs the Franciscan Order today. Also displayed are some linen cloths and a tunic, which by themselves seem forgettable but which actually represent one of the more curious aspects of Francis’s life.

  The linens were brought to Francis on his deathbed by a young widow, Lady Jacopa di Settesoli, with whom he often stayed in Rome and whom he had asked to see one last time before he died. (Her spontaneous arrival in Assisi without having receiv
ed his message is considered a miracle.) Lady Jacopa is said by all his early biographers to have been “highly pious,” so pious that Francis gave her the honorary title “Brother” Jacopa. As proof of her treasured role in his life, she is buried near him in his basilica, along with four of his early friars, Leo, Angelo, Masseo, and Clare’s cousin Rufino.

  Then there are his clothes—a patched, coarse gray habit, a pair of his tattered leather sandals, a piece of leather that is said to have covered the wound in his side from the stigmata. That seems a stretch. Could they really have been worn by him over eight hundred years ago? But perhaps I am being too rational instead of losing myself in the legend.

  Still, I feel the same way looking at relics in the Cappelli di Santa Chiara in Clare’s basilica. Another patched, uneven habit belonging to St. Francis and a tunic and cape that look far too big for the man Celano describes as of “medium height, closer to shortness.” Then there is a white, full-length gown identified as belonging to Clare, but its proportions are grotesquely big, which she couldn’t have been. She is described by Celano, who knew her and wrote her biography as well, as a “lovely young girl” in her early years, and there would have been little opportunity for her to gain weight in her later years. Clare fasted three full days a week until Francis ordered her not to, and then she ate little more than crusts of bread. As for the relic of her blond curls displayed in a glass box …

  The religious relics are more convincing, among them a breviàrio or prayer book used by St. Francis and the grata di S. Chiara, a filigree iron screen with a central opening through which Clare and her cloistered “sisters” discreetly received communion from a male priest. Upstairs, in the glassed-in Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, are the most important relics of all: another and undeniably authentic book of the Gospels used by Francis with an inscription by Brother Leo; and the original, six-foot-tall, colorfully painted Byzantine crucifix that, legend holds, spoke to Francis in the little ruined church of San Damiano in 1205 and started him on his life’s mission.