On the Road with Francis of Assisi

by Linda Bird Francke

  We barely rise above sea level. The engineering miracle of Italian tunnels—twenty-three in all on this trip—makes our transition through the mountains from Umbria to the Marches as level as sitting on a living room couch. In between tunnels, the scenery is simply staggering. Gigantic pinnacles of rock. Sheer cliffs and chasms. Firs and pines rising seemingly on top of one another. And there, on a far ridge, a still-visible ancient rock “ditch” or fossato that Francis and Giles themselves might have crossed the mountains on.

  Little is known about Francis’s first preaching foray to the Marches, in the spring of 1208. But it was a journey, however arduous, that he would make at least six other times. The people in the Marches eventually embraced Francis and his teachings warmly—by 1282, according to the Little Flowers of St. Francis, there would be eighty-five Franciscan friaries established in the Marches, double the number in Tuscany or Umbria. This first trip, however, was not a success.

  While Francis was evidently ecstatic walking through the forests of poplar, oak, and beech, and loudly “singing out in French, praising and blessing the Lord,” the farmers and villagers he came across did not share his jubilation. A medieval biographer, the Anonymous of Perugia, recounts that the people declared the wild-looking, barefooted Francis and Giles as “mad,” “fools,” or “drunkards.” “Young women, seeing them at a distance, would run away,” the biographer writes.

  Not only did the people distrust these self-proclaimed messengers of God but they rejected their message. There was little interest in religion of any kind at the time, among either pagans or the tepid, uninterested Christians. “Love and fear of God were non-existent almost everywhere and the way of penance was not only completely unknown, but it was also considered folly,” says the Legend of the Three Companions. “Lust for the flesh, greed for the world, and pride of life was so widespread, that the whole world seemed to be engulfed in these three malignancies.”

  Undeterred, Francis and Giles developed a routine. Francis would urge whomever they came across to fear and love God and do penance for their sins, while Giles would nod and say: “Believe him.” But nobody did.

  His other friars would fare no better on their first tentative forays, two by two through Umbria and toward the pilgrim path of St. James of Compostela in Spain. Before the friars set out, recounts the Legend of the Three Companions, Francis predicted that though they would find some “faithful people, meek and kind,” they would also find “many others, faithless, proud and blasphemous who will resist and reject you and what you say.” He was right.

  People were suspicious of the friars when they followed Francis’s instructions to greet them by saying: “God give you peace.” Then there was the strange way the friars looked, with their bare feet and their threadbare habits. Were they charlatans and thieves? Were they savages? And why wouldn’t they accept money as alms, like regular beggars?

  The friars were chased, sometimes beaten, splattered with mud, even stripped naked. But they evidently clung to Francis’s admonition to “to bear these things with patience and humility.” The friars never fought back or deviated from Francis’s message. “God give you peace,” they said, over and over, then exhorted the curious and often hostile crowds to repent and shun evil before it was too late. “Who are you?” the suspicious people asked them time and again. The friars always gave Francis’s answer: “We are penitents from Assisi.”

  Francis and Giles, the “penitents from Assisi” in the Marches, are thought to have gone to Fabriano, an established center in their time and now a sprawling industrialized city at the end of the twenty-third tunnel. Medieval Fabriano was known, and still is, as the papermaking capital of Italy. Not only did the city’s master papermakers invent the watermark but they produced the singular high-quality paper that is still used for banknotes all over the world. Contemporary artists, too, seek out Fabriano paper, as did the incomparable Leonardo da Vinci in the fifteenth century and the city’s famous native son, Gentile da Fabriano, in the fourteenth.

  We find modern Fabriano to be a rather cheerless city, but then again, when we arrive there it is midday, when everything in Italy seems to shut down, and it is also raining. We achieve Fabriano’s cavernous and curiously empty medieval piazza and park the car to review the notes from our Italian-language book I viaggi di S. Francesco d’Assisi nelle Marche—The Journeys of S. Francesco of Assisi in the Marches—which English-speaking Italians along the way have generously translated for us.

  Francis and Giles probably performed their routine in the piazza we’re parked in, but there is no record of it. Who knew then that the ragged little madman from Assisi would soon become one of the most recognized figures in Italy? What is recorded in the book is the trip Francis made to Fabriano just two years later, in 1210, when he was better known. He stayed in a sanctuary called the Eremo di S. Maria di Valdisasso, a former Benedictine convent for nuns just four and a half miles from Fabriano, near the village of Valleremita, and we set off to find it.

  In one of the minor miracles that begin to govern our pursuit of Francis, we chance upon a young woman standing under an arcade in the lonely piazza who knows exactly how to get to Valleremita and the convent of Valdisasso. We happen to be parked in exactly the right spot, she says. Take a right at the next stoplight and drive for 5.5 kilometers. We do, following the edge of a narrow, densely forested gorge to the little, lopsided village of Valleremita tucked into the end of the valley. Turn right up the hill in the center of town. We do, though our anxiety begins to mount as the road turns to red dirt and we don’t seem to be getting anywhere.

  Francis was evidently just as anxious about finding the convent. Our Italian book tells the story of him asking a farmer he chanced upon to accompany him to Valdisasso. The farmer, who was in the middle of plowing his field, was reluctant, but Francis somehow talked him into it. When the farmer returned from delivering Francis to the convent, he found that his field had been completely plowed, and further, his oxen were entirely rested.

  That field is still known locally as the “field of San Francesco,” and we undoubtedly pass it before, miraculously, we too arrive at the charming Franciscan sanctuary of Valdisasso. It was here, in the beautifully restored medieval stone convent, that Francis stayed for the first, but certainly not last, time with four of his friars. The Franciscans would base themselves at Valdisasso off and on for the next six hundred years, lending it the nickname Porziuncola of the Marches.

  The gate is locked, but there is room to walk around it to a manicured lawn terrace. An arched cloister with traces of frescoes on its walls and ceiling flanks one side of the lawn, the actual sanctuary, a second. There is a well-tended vegetable garden and flowers everywhere, in the window boxes of the sanctuary and in hanging baskets under the arches. Valdisasso is obviously inhabited, but by whom? We pull a cord to ring the sanctuary bell, but no one comes.

  We don’t feel we’re trespassing. There are several picnic tables in a glade just off the lawn, trails cut through the woods, and a very full garbage bin, which signal its public recreational use. That, plus a sign in Italian saying to please eat at the tables, not to litter, and to observe silenzio, makes us feel welcome as we look out over the gorge at miles and miles of forested mountains.

  We let ourselves into the sanctuary’s tiny, restored twelfth-century church, which is billed in one Italian translation on the Internet as having the “beautifulest ceiling.” The arched ceiling is indeed a marvel, but then so is the altarpiece, a copy of the coronation of the Virgin (the original was moved to Milan) attended by the various medieval saints who stayed at Valdisasso, including San Bernardino from Siena, San Giovanni of Capistrano, San Giacomo from Marca, and of course, San Francesco. All this unexpected beauty at the end of a dirt road in the seeming heart of nowhere.

  Francis and Giles returned to the Porziuncola after their first visit to the Marches, trekking fifteen miles a day. In keeping with Jesus’ command to his disciples—and Francis’s to his—they took nothing w
ith them on their journey and bartered their labor on farms and in villages along the way for food and lodging. From the beginning, Francis insisted that his friars work every day, preferably with their hands, or “with a trade they have learned,” provided that it was in keeping with goodness and honesty. “Idleness,” he wrote to his friars, quoting from the sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict, “is the enemy of the soul.”

  The early Franciscans’ work requirement would stand them in good stead. As strange as they looked, their free toil shoulder to shoulder with everyone else in the vineyards and hay fields and their gratitude in return for a crust of bread and a night’s sleep in a farm shed began to win them credibility. So did their work with the poor and the lepers. They lived what they preached—and with joy. “Let them be careful not to appear outwardly as sad and gloomy hypocrites but show themselves joyful, cheerful and consistently gracious in the Lord,” Francis directed his friars in an early, written rule. Modern Franciscans still take that rule to heart. Every friar we meet on our many journeys through Italy is positively merry.

  Soon after Francis returned to the Porziuncola, he set off again, this time with six of his friars. This second, and far more successful, preaching tour was to the Rieti Valley, a beautiful inland region of central Italy, halfway between Assisi and Rome, laced with forests and lakes and hills. Perhaps it was the valley’s natural wonders and agreeable climate that tempered the suspicions of its residents and made them more accepting of the early Franciscans.

  Unlike the people in the Marches, those in the Rieti Valley evidently listened to the penitents’ sermons and converted in high numbers. The people in the hill town of Poggio Bustone, where we are headed, were particularly enthusiastic about Francis and his message. Maybe that is why he added a new and still locally celebrated greeting—“buon giorno, buona gente”—a lively, rhythmic phrase in Italian that translates quite dully into English as “good day, good people.” So revolutionary was the greeting at the time, the people presumably never having been called “good,” that the Italian phrase is engraved on a wall in Poggio Bustone and is commemorated every year on the fourth of October, when the town crier races from house to house at dawn, calling out, “Buon giorno, buona gente.”

  Given the friars’ more harsh experiences elsewhere, it is not surprising that Francis would spend a great deal of time over the years—some say even more time than he spent in and around Assisi—in the hospitable Rieti Valley. He would establish at least five hermitages there, four of which exist to this day, in what has become known as the Sacred Valley of Rieti.

  Yet for all the success of his first preaching tour to the Rieti Valley, this was not a happy time for Francis. He was reportedly beset with confusion and feelings of unworthiness when he first arrived at Poggio Bustone in 1208 and went on to a Benedictine friary by the same name high above the town. What should he be instructing his little band of brothers? What was their mission? What was his mission? Most important, how could he preach the embrace of poverty and selflessness when he himself had lived such a sinful, hedonistic life? What business did he have urging people to love and nurse the lepers when he had spent years running away from them? Would God forgive him? Could he forgive himself?

  We, by contrast, are worried only about oxygen deprivation as we pass the town and start navigating the hairpin turns and switchbacks on the steep mountain road toward the old friary. Up and up we go, following the familiar gold cross sanctuary road signs through high olive groves and forests of ilex, pine, and oaks, until finally, around a last curve, we achieve the medieval stone church and friary of Poggio Bustone—only to discover the small parking lot is full. The white-paper ribbons festooning the cars signal a wedding is under way.

  Being seasoned Francis hands by now, we do not find it surprising in the least to encounter a wedding going on at the top of the world. Everyone in Italy, it seems, wants to be married, baptized, or eulogized in a church associated with St. Francis. And Poggio Bustone is Francis.

  I know from his biographers that Francis, not content with being at the already dizzying heights of the friary, climbed another thousand feet, to what is known as the Grotto of Revelations or the Upper Shrine, to beg for God’s forgiveness. We set out on foot along the road next to the church, following signs to the Sacro Speco.

  Our paperback guide to the hermitages in the Rieti Valley describes the route to the Upper Shrine as a “steep pathway.” That is no exaggeration. For close to thirty minutes we labor straight up the cobbled mountain path, pausing only to pant and admire the wild, dwarf red cyclamen blooming in the woods.

  Along the way we pass several stone shrines with open iron grilles, each giving us false hope that we have achieved the Upper Shrine. But no. Enclosed in the seventeenth-century shrines we pass are sacred rocks, one described by a wooden sign as bearing the imprint of Francis’s knees; another encasing the footprint of an angel; a third, the twisted image of the devil. Still we climb, the church below receding to the size of a dollhouse toy, until we reach a large rock hanging precipitously over the valley. It is crowned with a rude wooden cross, a plastic water bottle bearing a single red poppy, and a wooden sign that translates: “The cross: from here St. Francis blessed the Rieti Valley.”

  For all that the sentiment must be reassuring to the residents of the valley, it does not seem quite accurate. The legend says that Francis wrestled with his conscience on this wild outcropping of rock and prayed for days for forgiveness. “He persevered there for a long time with fear and trembling before the Lord of the whole earth,” Celano writes, “and he thought in the bitterness of his soul of the years he had spent wretchedly, frequently repeating this word: ‘O God, be merciful to me the sinner.’ ”

  I climb up on the rock to see if I can re-create the feeling of desperation Francis must have been experiencing, but what strikes me, besides vertigo, is the beauty of the valley stretching out below me. And the silence. There isn’t a sound except for the occasional bird’s call and the whisper of the wind in the trees—until the wedding ends.

  I nearly meet God myself on the rock when the church bells suddenly start to peal below, followed by the blare of car horns and some celebratory gunshots. The adrenaline rush gets me off the rock and back on the path, so steep at this point that it becomes steps cut into the side of the mountain. And suddenly—unbelievably—we arrive at a very old church, clinging to the edge of a chalk cliff. There we are, alone with Francis, at what must be the doorway to heaven. But we are definitely not the first.

  There are hundreds of little handmade twig crosses stuck in the netting holding the cliff in place, as well as a bell over the church entry with a celebratory rope for pilgrims to pull. Inside the skyscraping chapel, through a tiny, unlocked wooden door, is an ancient fresco of St. Bernardino and more twig crosses propped up on the little altar, along with fresh roses, candles, and crucifixes. And there, in the rear of the fifteenth-century church, festooned with vases of fresh poppies and daisies and hyacinth along with more candles and handmade crosses, is the Grotto of Revelations itself, the cave where Francis repaired briefly to sleep before resuming his entreaties to God for forgiveness.

  God must have responded positively, which is a blessing to all who for centuries have held Francis in such high esteem. Francis might very well have never come down from that mountaintop if he had not found absolution from his agony. But he did. “Little by little, a certain unspeakable joy and very great sweetness began to flood his innermost heart,” writes Celano. “He began also to stand aloof from himself and as his feelings were checked and the darkness that had gathered in his heart because of his fear of sin dispelled, there was poured into him a certainty that all his sins had been forgiven, and a confidence of his restoration to grace was given him.”

  The Francis who finally returned to his worried friars waiting in the hermitage below “seemed changed into another man,” notes Celano. And he was. Somewhere between the rock and the grotto, Francis had accepted his conversion from playb
oy to penitent to emerge the humble pilgrim of enduring legend.

  It is little wonder, then, that so many people before us have made the uphill trek to the sacred Grotto of Revelations, though we haven’t seen a soul. The handmade twig crosses and assorted fresh flowers are testament to the pilgrims’ faith in the power of forgiveness and renewal personified by the “penitent” from Assisi. So is the church’s guest book, the first such registry we have seen. Most of the messages are in Italian, some in German and French, and a few in English. “We traveled a long way from Dallas, Texas, and Rockall, Texas,” reads one entry from the anxious autumn of 2002. “We pray for peace, love and understanding.”

  Returning downhill, we find more of Francis’s legend at Poggio Bustone inside the now empty single-nave church. On one wall is a painting of Francis kneeling on the rock at the top of the mountain in front of a forgiving angel while his original six friars wait anxiously for him in the hermitage below. Another painting depicts the legendary exchange an older Francis had with the people of Poggio Bustone.

  Francis is stooped and emaciated, and he is holding his hand over his heart in an attitude of confession. The image fits perfectly a sermon the ailing Francis delivered on a much later visit to Poggio Bustone when he publicly confessed to eating forbidden lard during a period of fasting. His “sin” was easily explained by the decision of a worried friar to cook his vegetables with a little lard to try to coax Francis to eat, but Francis chose to use the episode to broadcast his hypocrisy and to present himself as unworthy of any exaltation. “In this way, he often ascribed to pleasure what had been granted to him because of his infirmity,” writes Celano. Such self-deprecation was one of Francis’s most endearing and enduring characteristics. He was a human being like everyone else, he was telling the people, and just as prone to stumble on the road to salvation.