On the Road with Francis of Assisi

by Linda Bird Francke

Today, the ferry trip from Zadar to Italy takes a few hours; for Francis the return trip turned out to be even more fraught than the outgoing one. According to St. Bonaventure, the stranded Francis had no money to pay for his passage, and the hard-hearted sailors of a ship going to Ancona refused his entreaties “to take him with them for the love of God.” Francis had to resort to the age-old method of secretly stowing himself and his companion friar in the hold of the ship. They might very well have starved to death had not a well-wisher, “sent by God for this poor man,” arrived at the ship just before it sailed and secretly handed the food Francis and his brother would need on the passage to a God-fearing sailor who was instructed to distribute it to them “in a friendly fashion in their time of need.”

  The time of need turned out to be universal aboard the ship as it ran into such a “great storm,” according to Celano, that the sailors had to “spend many days laboring at the oars.” The food supplies onboard dwindled until only the few alms miraculously provided for Francis remained—which prompted a second miracle. The small cache of food “multiplied so much that while they were delayed at sea for many days by the relentless storm, it fully supplied their needs until they reached the port of Ancona,” writes St. Bonaventure. By then, the hard-hearted sailors had changed their attitude toward the stowaways, realizing that they had “escaped many threats of death through God’s servant.”

  Francis, safely back on dry land, decided to save souls closer to home, in the Marches. He did not give up his determination to convert the Saracens: He would try, and fail again, in 1213 after falling gravely ill in Spain en route to Morocco. At this point in his legend, however, Francis left the port in Ancona and “began to walk the earth and to sow in it the seed of salvation,” writes St. Bonaventure. His preaching tour started in Ancona and went on through the coastal towns and mountain villages of the Marches, “reaping fruitful harvests.” After their initial mistrust of Francis, the simple, land-loving people of the Marches had become more receptive to him than the populations of any other part of Italy, and soon, Celano writes, “many good and suitable men … followed him devoutly in his life and proposal.”

  Following Francis on his preaching tour of the Marches turns out to be an unexpected delight for us. The entire eastern edge of the small province fronts on the sunlit Adriatic and on the west is bounded by the snowcapped Sibilene mountains. In between, the Marches’ fertile land is a dazzling patchwork of farms and vineyards, and its old, inland hill towns are virtually tourist-free. We eat splendid Marche meals of fresh grilled fish; coniglio in coccio, rabbit cooked in white wine and milk; olive Ascolane, a Marche specialty of giant breaded and deep-fried olives stuffed with minced meat and cheese; and top it all off with a nightly bottle of Verdicchio, the local white wine.

  Francis’s first and very pleasant stop, as is ours, was in the tiny seaside resort village of Sirolo, seven miles from Ancona. Local legend holds that he stayed here in an inn built into the city walls, and we stay in that same inn, now a tony seven-room hotel called the Locanda Rocco. Francis is said to have performed a miracle from an upstairs room—he saved the life of a man who was about to fall from the inn’s adjacent arch onto the cobbled stone street below. We stay in that room.

  One of our windows looks straight out at the “miraculous” stone arch entry into the town, embedded with a Crusader cross. Another window overlooks the Adriatic, and still another frames the distant, floodlit, and mammoth pilgrimage Sanctuary of Loreto, which contains what the faithful believe is the original stone house of the Virgin Mary in Nazareth, flown here by angels in 1294. Francis reportedly predicted the airborne delivery of the Virgin’s house to Loreto, then the site of a thriving Franciscan community, a prophecy that seems perfectly in keeping with the medieval ethos of the Marches.

  The residents of the Marches, including the early native Franciscan friars, were noted for their poetic fancy and mystical natures. The Little Flowers of St. Francis was written by a friar from the Marches and includes many stories of Marche friars overcome by religious ecstasy. One, Brother John of Fermo, “would run as if drunk: sometimes through the garden, sometimes through the woods, sometimes through the church, as the flame and force of the spirit drove him.” A later and popular Marche friar, St. Joseph of Cupertino, the patron saint for students taking exams, frequently levitated and flew through the air. His remains are preserved, under glass, at the church dedicated to him in Ósimo, a Marche hill town.

  Sirolo is a perfect repository of that mysticism. An engraved stone plaque near a tiny old chapel just down the street from the Locanda Rocco tells the legend of the still-standing trees Francis planted here with his own hands, in 1212. Because of the bright color of their seedpods, the trees are known locally as the “cherries of St. Francis.”

  The “cherry” trees are just inside the walls of the Vetta Marina, now a private estate and the site where Francis was given a convent by a local noble either in 1212 or on a return trip in 1215. Massimo, the estate’s caretaker and hunting friend of the owner of the Locanda Rocco, graciously shows us the ruins of the old convent, then takes us along a manicured gravel path to the edge of the estate’s seaside cliff. According to local legend, Francis stood on this dizzying 330-foot-high cliff and preached to the fish that had gathered in large numbers in the milky blue sea below to listen to the holy man.

  And the Marche legends only get more charming. It is the saga of Francis and a lamb that leads us along the cattailed road from Sirolo inland to the hill town of Ósimo. According to Celano, Francis and one of his friars, Brother Paul, were walking along this road when Francis saw what he considered a sacrilege—a lamb alone among a herd of goats. Francis identified lambs with Christ, but for all his love of animals, he evidently did not like goats. “Do you see that sheep walking so meekly among these many goats?” Francis asked Brother Paul. “I tell you, in the same way our Lord Jesus Christ, meek and humble, walked among the Pharisees and chief priests.”

  Francis wanted to buy the sheep to spare its humiliation among the goats, but he and Paul had no money, and the cheap tunics they were wearing were not sufficient for barter. Miraculously, a traveling merchant came on the scene and bought the sheep for them. So now, Francis and Paul had a sheep, which they took with them to Ósimo to visit the bishop.

  Ósimo seems a rather cheerless, steep-streeted town when we arrive on a cold and gray morning, perhaps because we meet there with our first—and only—unpleasant encounter in all our Italian travels. We stop in a coffee bar for a warming cappuccino on our way up to the thirteenth-century Cathedral di San Leopardo, and a drunk in the bar apparently makes such rude remarks about us in Italian that an offended patron throws him out the door.

  Francis’s welcome was undoubtedly warmer than ours but not altogether satisfactory. He, Paul, and the lamb proceeded up the same steep street to the cathedral and right up the steps into the sanctuary, to be greeted by the startled bishop. Celano credits the bishop with being “touched in his heart” by the parable of the sheep—but he did not offer to take the animal from Francis. So Francis, after preaching to the good folk of Ósimo the next day, left the hill town with Paul and the lamb, with Francis beginning “to wonder what to do with the sheep.”

  His answer leads us from Ósimo some twenty-five miles across the Marches to the small and important medieval Franciscan town of San Severino, where Francis solved the sheep problem by presenting the animal as a gift to the Poor Clares cloistered there. Unlike the bishop in Ósimo, the Poor Clares in San Severino reportedly accepted the lamb “as a great gift from God.” According to Celano, the “maidservants of Christ … devotedly cared for the sheep” and made a tunic for Francis out of its wool, a tunic he received back in Assisi “with great reverence and high spirits, hugging and kissing it.”

  The medieval center of San Severino, with its handsome elliptical, arcade-rimmed piazza, is rich with Franciscan lore. Francis was officially here at least twice and left a plethora of miracles in his wake—a boy cure
d of leprosy, a man restored to life after being crushed by a stone. Francis’s preaching converted several sons of San Severino to his order, including Brother Masseo, one of his earliest and closest friars, and Brother Bentivoglia, whose thirteenth-century body was so graphically preserved and lit under glass in one of the town’s many churches that it scared people. (His face is now covered more soothingly in wax, but his bony feet are natural.)

  The enthusiastic Marche friars, in turn, converted other young men from San Severino, including an unnamed “very vain youth” who, the Deeds of Blessed Francis and His Companions notes, had previously been “noble, refined and lusty.” And it was here, at the old Franciscan friary and church, that Francis made his most famous conversion of all.

  Brother Fabio greets us at the church high on a hill overlooking the town. He is a Capuchin friar, a member of an autonomous branch of the Franciscan Order formed in the early sixteenth century in the Marches in protest of the more secular policies being practiced by the Franciscan heirs of Brother Elias. Brother Fabio is a young man and has a beard, as do all Capuchin friars, and he is wearing the brown habit and the order’s signature peaked hood, which symbolizes the habits and hoods worn by Francis and the early friars; the small, round hood worn by other Franciscan orders is thought to symbolize the relaxation of Francis’s primitive clarity. (The Italians’ ever-present sense of humor seized on the Capuchins’ light coffee-colored hood, or capuche, and used the name to identify the espresso coffee drink cappuccino, with its peaks of foam.)

  But back to the famous conversion and the reason we are visiting Brother Fabio. It was in this small, twelfth-century stone church, he tells us, that the dramatic and unexpected conversion of the poet laureate of Emperor Frederick II’s court, known as the King of Verses, took place. The imperial lyricist, William of Lisciano, whose sister was a Poor Clare, had come out of curiosity to hear Francis preach when suddenly he had a vision: Two shining sword blades in the shape of the cross of Jesus appeared on Francis’s breast. “Stunned at once by what he saw, he began to resolve to do better,” writes St. Bonaventure.

  Brother Pacifico, as Francis named the poet laureate, became a major figure in the early Franciscan Order. In 1217 he was sent to France, where he established the first province there of the Friars Minor, and seven years later he was at La Verna when Francis received the stigmata. Pacifico is also credited with setting the sayings and songs of Francis to verse. And his vision and induction into the order happened right here, in 1212.

  The church has changed, of course, since Francis’s time. Brother Fabio tells us that the Poor Clares enlarged it in the fourteenth century to commemorate the canonization of St. Clare and added windows and a Gothic arch. The sisters left in the sixteenth century, and the Capuchin friars moved in—with disastrous results. The austere friars thought the frescoed walls of the church looked too opulent, so they stuccoed over them. In the eighteenth century, they added another window and a new floor. “They made so many changes, you can hardly recognize the original church,” laments Brother Fabio.

  Even so, standing in the old part of the church and looking up at the thirteenth-century crucifix over the altar, I easily feel the presence of Francis. And again outside in the convent’s lush garden. And at the huge thirteenth-century Porta San Francesco at the top of the hill near the ruins of his church. And in the extraordinary art in the Pinacoteca Civica, San Severino’s municipal art gallery, which boasts a fifteenth-century Pinturicchio altarpiece, Madonna della Pace, and two fourteenth-century altarpieces from the old monastery of the Poor Clares by Paolo Veneziano. There is also a whole room of vibrant fresco fragments from the old Chiesa di San Francesco, among them Francis with Pope Honorius III and an anguished Francis holding up the church on his shoulder.

  Francis was even more successful gathering new friars—thirty in all—in the stunning Marche city of Ascoli Piceno, some forty miles from San Severino. Ascoli sits on the Via Salaria, the ancient but still heavily traveled Roman road from the Adriatic coast in the Marches and over the Torritao Pass through the Apennines to Rome. The approach to this busy border city through the urban sprawl of sixteen-story apartment buildings is not auspicious, but its medieval heart turns out to be sensational.

  Many of the piazzas and the sidewalks are paved in local travertine stone, as are the details on many of the houses. Everything gleams in the sun and also, unfortunately for us, in the rain. But nothing dampens our enthusiasm for this old but also affluently modern city, with its medieval buildings and many cafés and restaurants.

  We follow Francis to the Piazza Arringo, in front of the sixth-century Cathedral of Sant’Emidio, where he is said to have delivered the impassioned sermon that won him so many new friars. The piazza is being repaved, and a lunchtime crowd has gathered to watch the skilled mason set each perfectly matched cobblestone in place, then tap it three times with the handle of his trowel to secure it in the sand below.

  For centuries, the Piazza Arringo was the site for all of Ascoli’s public assemblies. Politicians, firebrands, and roaming religious, including Francis, spoke to the assembled hordes from under an elm tree, but the tree appears to be gone. The lunch crowd gathered around the piazza, however, is reminiscent of the crowd that greeted Francis—except that it is far more orderly.

  His reputation as Christ on earth had preceded him, according to Francis’s biographers, and his arrival in Ascoli caused a near riot. One version, commissioned by Francis’s friend Pope Gregory IX, appears in the thirteenth-century versified life of Francis by Henri d’Avranches.

  He is entering the city of Ascoli when all

  The sick come to him; and a struggle there is

  To see if they can touch even the hem of his garments.

  For they regard his very garments as relics,

  And so they tear them off him that he goes around

  In tatters. And they offer him loaves which he blesses;

  A crumb of which, seasoned with faith, mitigates pains,

  Alleviates ailments and brings riddance to injuries.

  Celano’s version of Francis in Ascoli is only slightly less dramatic. “There he spoke the word of God with his usual fervor,” Celano writes. “Nearly all the people were filled with such grace and devotion that they were trampling each other in their eagerness to hear and see him. Thirty men, cleric and lay, at that time received the habit of holy religion from him.”

  The strong impression Francis made on Ascoli continues in its art galleries and churches. A sweet thirteenth-century fresco in the church of San Gregorio Magno, believed to be one of the earliest depictions of Francis, shows him looking very young, preaching to the birds. Francis is also portrayed, among other saints, in the Pinacoteca Civica, by the fifteenth-century artist Carlo Crivelli, who had to flee Venice after an adultery scandal and fetched up in Ascoli. Tucked away in a poorly lit corner is a huge, very dark painting of Francis receiving the stigmata, attributed, unbelievably, to Tiziano Vecellio, otherwise known as Titian, the sixteenth-century Venetian genius. The museum also displays the gorgeous thirteenth-century gold-and-silver-thread Papal cape worn by Nicholas IV, the first Franciscan Pope and a son of Ascoli.

  In between galleries and churches, the rainy weather gives us the perfect excuse to hang out at the splendid Art Nouveau Caffè Meletti on Ascoli’s central piazza, the Piazza del Popolo. Tout Ascoli appears to assemble daily at the Meletti’s white Carrara marble tables and velvet sofas for coffee, platters of prosciutto, and the café’s signature anisetta aperitif, and we eagerly join them.

  Looking out from the warmth of the Meletti at the panorama of medieval buildings framing the marble Piazza del Popolo easily fills a morning respite. One of these structures, occupying an entire end of the piazza, is the massive thirteenth-century church of San Francesco.

  We have long since learned to hire English-speaking guides in important Franciscan locations like Assisi, Perugia, and San Severino. Our guides in Ascoli—Leila, who has her fourteen-month-old son, Le
onardo, with her, and her more fluent friend, Emanuella—point out details in the intricately carved travertine portico around the main entrance into the church that we never would have known: The triangular peak of the portico represents Christ speaking to the world through the Franciscan figures at the ends of all the upper flutes; the twelve descending roses represent the apostles, and the one open rose, fourth from the top, represents the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; the seventy-two diamonds represent the pairs of the first thirty-six Christians spreading the word of Christ; the figures of St. Francis and St. Anthony hold books to identify them as preachers. And so on.

  Leila points out the dents in the rounded travertine flutes flanking the door to the church. The dents have been formed by pilgrims who rap the flutes with their knuckles, she says, because the resulting sound is that of organ pipes. We follow suit. She’s right. “It is music for Franciscans close to God,” she says.

  Mass is being said inside the cavernous church, so we tour it in whispers. Some of the stained glass windows tell old stories—Francis and his first meeting with Pope Innocent III, Francis preaching in Ascoli—but others are startlingly modern: One depicts Pope Paul VI addressing the United Nations in New York in 1965, and another, a professorial-looking, youngish man wearing wire-rimmed glasses and dressed in prison stripes.

  He turns out to be Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish friar and sainted martyr who was sent to Auschwitz by the occupying Germans during World War II for harboring two thousand Jews at his convent. Kolbe was killed in the death camp after voluntarily taking the place of a young father condemned, with nine others, to death by starvation in retribution for the escape of three POWs. Kolbe is said to have buoyed the spirits of the starving men by leading them in prayer and song day after day until he was the last left alive. The Germans then injected him with carbolic acid.

  Francis must surely have been a model of courage and conviction for Brother Kolbe, which is somehow comforting in light of the horrors he endured. Had Kolbe been in Ascoli some seven hundred years before, he might very well have been among the thirty men Francis converted to his order, all of whom, like Kolbe and Francis himself, would court martyrdom.