On the Road with Francis of Assisi

by Linda Bird Francke

  However humble it was of Francis to eat just a little bread, so as not to emulate the forty-day fast of Jesus, it was not good at all for his health. Already sickly from bone tuberculosis and recurring bouts of malaria, Francis is thought to have developed chronic gastritis and a gastric ulcer from his ongoing anorexic regimen. Add to that his reluctance to drink water “even when he was burning with thirst,” as Celano notes admiringly, and the scene is set for the slow degradation of all his internal organs. In the religious fever of the Middle Ages, such abstinence was believed to feed the soul, and there was no concept at the time of the harm it did to the body.

  We leave Lake Trasimeno and head north into Tuscany, where Francis would establish three hermitages near Cortona, Cetona, and Sarteano. All hermitages, we soon discover, are not alike. A surprising number, like the Celle di Cortona, are still working convents, with resident friars and regular masses open to the public; several other Franciscan hermitages and convents, including the one at Cetona, house social programs like Mondo X, a Franciscan-led community for troubled youth; still others, like Sarteano, are little more than caves.

  Regardless of what the hermitages are now, they were lifelines for Francis. Always frail, he needed time to recover both spiritually and physically from his far-ranging preaching tours. His friars, too, needed solitude and contemplation. The Franciscans spent so much time on the road that they required retreats along the way for camaraderie and spiritual renewal. New converts to the order, whose numbers were doubling every year, also yearned for places they could gather in their own locales. And so the number of hermitages grew and grew.

  We are never sure what we’re going to find on our hermitage quest; we simply circle on our maps the approximate locations of the hermitage names we have taken from the medieval texts. The treasure hunt through the Italian countryside, however, is always beautiful. Especially our drive to Cortona and its nearby hermitage through the rolling vineyards of Tuscany.

  The Celle di Cortona is nestled into the end of a wooded gorge halfway up the side of Mount Egidio. There is no sign directing us to the celle, which makes the first sight of the extensive stone complex at the end of a windy mountain road all the more extraordinary. Nothing has prepared us for the beautiful and immaculate Franciscan convent, straddling a rushing mountain stream and a waterfall. There are terraced gardens, arched bridges over the stream, and wooden-railed paths lacing the grounds. The celle is the most “uptown” sanctuary we’ve found to date, though we don’t see a soul. A sign at the entrance tells us there are friars in residence, and there is a bell to pull to summon them, but the solitude is such that we don’t want to disturb it—or them. Besides, we miraculously find an English-language guide in a wall rack, so we are able to show ourselves around.

  Local legend has it that Francis was directed to this rugged spot by someone he met in Cortona, just two miles away, and that he came to the celle for the first time in 1211 after his Lenten fast on the Isola Maggiore. There was already a cluster of small mills along the stream, but what evidently attracted Francis was a fan-shaped recess in the mountain’s rock face. Like the rock cleft we had seen at Sant’Urbano near Narni, and similar split rocks at many of his retreats, the natural stone niche at the celle became a favorite place of solitude and prayer for Francis. The niche is incorporated now into the substantial building that houses the convent’s current oratory, but portions of its rough face remain exposed.

  Francis’s physical presence at the celle is confined to two rooms: the sanctuary’s low, timbered-ceiling oratorio, which served as a dormitory for the early friars; and Francis’s tiny stone cell, enlivened with baskets of fresh lavender, a copy of his famous portrait by Cimabue, and a somewhat garish painting of the Madonna and Child. The cell, with its familiar stone slab bed, stone pillow, and wooden plank for a mattress, seems carefully recreated to evoke Francis, and it could be an exhibit in the Smithsonian. Even the coarse cloth or impannate covering the windows is authentic to the preglass times Francis lived in. The painting of the Madonna and Child on the cell wall is not; the thirteenth-century original was stolen some years ago, and this is a copy. The cell is fenced off now, effectively discouraging common thieves and devout pilgrims from taking fragments of plaster and wood as souvenir relics.

  Francis’s spiritual presence, however, is everywhere, along the paths and by the waterfall, making the legends about him at the celle seem perfectly plausible. One centers on a new cloak that his friars had gone to some trouble to find for him, only to have Francis give it away to a poor man who came to the celle grieving for his dead wife. Francis was smart enough to realize the man would probably sell the cloak and cautioned him not to “hand it over to anyone unless they pay well for it.” But his friars, seeing the man leaving the celle with their hard-won cloak, were moved to act in a very uncharacteristic way. They tried to wrest the cloak away from the poor man so they could give it back to Francis, but the man “clutched it with both hands and defended it as his own.” The legend says that the friars finally had to pay the man the price he demanded to get it back, which is also curious in that the friars were forbidden even to touch money.

  But the friars were probably at their wits’ end trying to keep Francis adequately clothed. He was forever giving away his mantle or parts of his tunic to anyone in need, and often to people, including his own “brothers,” who simply asked for something he was wearing. The belief was that anything the holy Francis had touched would bring good fortune to its new bearer and ease his suffering, a belief so strong that often people did not even ask but simply plucked at his tunic to secure a lucky relic. Francis had to patch and repatch his tunic, but he remained so eager to “offer to others things he had denied his own body, even though they were extremely necessary for him” that he was finally ordered by the minister general of his order and the brother appointed as his guardian not to give away his clothing without their permission.

  Knowing Francis’s penchant for giving away his clothing, his friars must have been ecstatic on this first trip to Cortona at the generosity of their wealthy host. Known as Guido, the man promised to use his wealth to pay for all the Franciscans’ future cloaks and tunics. Whether he did or not is unknown, because Guido shortly became a Franciscan convert himself and spent the rest of his life in a cave along the stream at the celle. That cave, too, has been incorporated into one of the buildings and is now the convent’s library.

  The celle is also closely associated with Francis’s most controversial friar, Elias of Cortona. Elias, who would become head of the order in 1221, after Francis resigned, lived off and on at the celle and added a third level and five more cells, which still have ceilings made of reeds. But that isn’t what made him controversial. The debate remains whether Elias was Francis’s most loyal disciple or, as many think, his Judas.

  The positive argument could readily be made that, without the farsighted Elias, there would not be a Franciscan Order today. Francis was a dreamer, not a CEO. He would reluctantly make some changes to accommodate the order’s burgeoning number of friars—in 1217, for example, he would abandon his relaxed approach to his evangelical vision and accept the geographical division of his flock into “provinces,” each with a provincial minister—but Elias would go further, much further.

  It was Elias, the organization man, who would translate Francis’s romantic dream of the “Lord’s wandering minstrels” into a sustainable Catholic order by dividing the free-form body into seventy-two distinct provinces; it was Elias, the public relations man, who would make Franciscanism global by multiplying the order’s foreign missions; it was Elias, according to the biographer Omer Englebert, who contrary to Francis’s embrace of solitude and hermetical worship, “promoted study, and urged the friars to mix in politics”; and it was Elias, the pragmatist, who would pressure Francis to relax his strictest rules to accommodate the exploding number of would-be friars. Under Elias, for example, houses began to rise for the Franciscan clerics and scholars who did not want
to wander the land barefoot.

  All this may have been necessary to keep the order alive, but such departures from Francis’s ideal of radical poverty and humility constituted a betrayal to the first, inner circle of friars and subsequent generations of purists. And it got worse, much worse, after Francis died.

  Elias, the showman, would build himself a house in the fanciest part of Cortona and have a world-class chef; Elias, the brilliant architect and builder, would design and construct the current and opulent basilica in Assisi without regard to Francis’s insistence on simplicity; Elias, the venture capitalist, would finance the construction of the basilica by soliciting financial contributions despite Francis’s anathema toward money and build such a luxurious attached convent for the new breed of friars that the first friars grumbled: “All they need now is wives.” Worst of all, several of the dissenting first friars were beaten and thrown in prison. One even died.

  Elias’s “sins” would not go unpunished. It was probably here at the celle that, well before Elias enacted all these changes, Francis had an apocryphal dream that Elias was damned and would die outside the order. Francis was so horrified by this revelation from God that he stopped speaking to Elias, even stopped looking at him. Elias, who was devoted to Francis in his way, finally forced Francis to tell him why he was being shunned, and on hearing about the prophecy, cried so piteously that Francis said he would pray to God for his forgiveness. And it worked—after a fashion. Though the dream would come true in that some three decades later Elias was excommunicated and defrocked for siding with the emperor against the Pope, a last-minute plea to the Pope from a sympathetic friar brought him absolution and returned him to the Franciscan Order in 1253, while he was lying critically ill at the celle.

  But it is Francis, not Elias, whose spirit lingers on among the tumbled rocks and noisy streams at the celle. The guide we’d picked up quotes a 1705 chronicle that marvels at the “gentle fragrance which overcomes every odor of nature” in and around Francis’s cell. Moving on in time, the guide recounts a miracle in 1882, when a construction worker, seeming crushed by a huge boulder, emerged “hale and hearty as before,” and yet another miracle in 1959, when two men fell into the “stream in full flood” and survived with only minor injuries.

  All this goodwill conspires to make us feel totally secure on the mountain road back down from the celle and the journey through the Chianti vineyards and ancient olive groves of southern Tuscany to the next hermitage Francis founded, at Cetona. And another surprise.

  If ever there is a success story for the Franciscan involvement with Mondo X, it is the convent at Cetona. Near the “hermitage” cave of travertine rock Francis prayed in, the thirteenth-century Convento di San Francesco is now a sought-after restaurant and inn nestled on the side of a forested hillside. There are walking trails through the woods, a medieval church and chapel, cloisters and courtyards, terraces and gardens, and seven serene bedrooms, all with baths.

  The Mondo X commune of young men and women at Cetona, one of thirty-five such communities founded by a Franciscan friar, Padre Eligio, worked together for twelve years to restore the beautiful convent and to transform the cells the early friars reserved for pilgrims into comfortable modern rooms, furnished with antiques, for paying guests. There is no television and no swimming pool, but there is a first-class restaurant run by the resident commune. So we settle down to a delicious six-course lunch, starting with prosecco in the garden and moving on through the multiple courses assembled from the fresh produce in the convent’s gardens.

  There are no Franciscan legends that we know of directly associated with Cetona, but that is not surprising. Geographical location was not a medieval criterion for the recounting of Francis and his legend, and many sites are referred to simply as “the place.” But Cetona must have been important to the Franciscans then, because it certainly is now. A convocation of senior Franciscans in 2002 chose to meet at three places: the Porziuncola in Santa Maria degli Angeli; La Verna, where Francis received the stigmata; and the Convento di San Francesco in Cetona.

  Thrilled by our discovery in Cetona, we press on with Francis to Sarteano, a photo-perfect Tuscan castle town just north of Cetona where Francis preached in the winter of 1212. He lived for a time within the walls of the tenth-century castle with some local monks and helped care for the sick in the hospital of Santa Maria outside the walls. But Francis, as ever, yearned for solitude and soon started climbing the hills above Sarteano to find perfect seclusion. He succeeded. And so, after many false starts, do we.

  Unlike Cetona, the hermitage two miles above Sarteano is rich with documented legends about Francis. It was here that Francis so fixated on his injunction against the ownership of any property that when he overheard a friar saying he had just come from Francis’s cell, Francis declared he would never use that cell again. It was from this hermitage that Francis, who claimed he could see Mount Subasio thirty-eight miles distant, dispatched Brother Masseo to San Damiano to ask Clare whether he would better serve God as a hermit or as a pilgrim. And it was at Sarteano that Francis had one of his epic fights with the devil.

  On a cold, snowy winter night, the legend goes, the devil so tempted Francis with the desires of the flesh that Francis finally took off his habit and whipped his naked body with the cord so strenuously that he was covered in welts. But the devil’s wicked lust continued. The bruised and naked Francis then confronted his desire by suddenly leaving his cell to build a family out of snow.

  He sculpted a father and a mother, and two sons and two daughters, and a servant and a maid to take care of them all, then called out to his naked body: “Hurry, and clothe them all, for they are dying of cold. But if caring for them in so many ways troubles you, be solicitous for serving God alone.” And with that, according to Celano, the devil withdrew “in confusion,” and Francis went back to his cell, praising God.

  All this makes it imperative for us to find where Francis built his snow family. We set out with the directions we’ve been given in a coffee bar and head up into the hills on the Via dei Cappuccini. We are heartened when we see a hand-painted sign reading “Celle di San Francesco” and keep on going up an ever-steeper dirt road until we come to a fork and another primitively hand-painted sign to the celle. And then it becomes ridiculous. We take the fork and proceed straight up the ever-narrowing, increasingly washed-out road until the branches of the roadside bushes and trees cover the windshield and our wheels start spinning.

  The prudent course is to back the car down that track until we can turn around and depart, but somewhere on that mountain is the hermitage of Sarteano. So my husband starts rolling the car backward, and I start hiking up the path, which is so steep that I need the walking stick I pick up on the side of the path to keep from sliding backward down the mountain. And then, suddenly, around a last gasping turn, I step onto a small plateau. In front of me is a massive, three-story-high boulder hollowed through at the base by a waist-high natural arch and bearing another hand-painted sign, reading “San Francesco.” We have found the hermitage.

  I crawl through the arch to find myself on the edge of the plateau and in the midst of a complex of caves on the back side of the rock, which I discover later are Ionic Age tombs. I stoop to enter one of the cells and discover that I am hardly the first to do so. A hand-carved wooden sign inside reads, “Una Notte Chiamo per Francesco,” and there are unlit candles and slightly wilted flowers and passport photographs of families and children presumably seeking Francis’s blessing. I shake my head in disbelief, thinking I must be imagining these icons in such an impossibly remote spot, but my husband arrives on his hands and knees and sees the same thing.

  We explore the other caves, which is not altogether easy. The mountain ledge is very narrow, and we have to navigate over the raised, intertwined roots of trees and then climb the crumbly rock to reach the caves. But the peril is well worth it. One of the caves we achieve is adorned with a rude cross chiseled into its stone wall.

  Few p
eople reading this book will probably make the difficult journey to this hermitage. And understandably so. There is no payoff of a medieval convent or a church with gorgeous art or splendid gardens or a waterfall. What there is, is the stark reality of a no-frills medieval hermitage and the literal experience of what Francis and his followers sought out and endured. “He often chose solitary places to focus his heart entirely on God,” Celano writes. No other “solitary” place we would find on our journey with Francis would duplicate the rugged authenticity of Sarteano. It was among these caves, in the dead of winter, I remind myself, that he built his “family” out of snow.

  Francis was well aware of the severity of life in the hermitages. He worried about his friars who chose to live in the growing number of secluded cave complexes or primitive mountain huts, and in 1217, he wrote the Rule for Hermitages governing the friars’ behavior and spiritual life. To ensure the close bonds of a “family,” he limited their numbers to three or four per hermitage and decreed that “two of these should be mothers and they may have two sons or at least one.” Having determined that the appointed “mothers” would look after their “sons” and “protect” them from outsiders, he also ordered that each would have his own cell, “in which he may pray and sleep.”

  Francis remained characteristically harsh on himself, however. During one cold winter, his friars grew so concerned for his health that they sewed an animal skin to the inside of his habit for warmth. Francis, being ever obedient, accepted the pelt next to his skin but insisted that another be added to the outside of his habit so everyone would know of his hypocrisy.