On the Road with Francis of Assisi: A Timeless Journey Through Umbria and Tuscany, and Beyond - Hardcover

Linda Bird Francke, a former editor at Newsweek and award-winning journalist, is the author of Ground Zero: The Gender Wars in the Military and Growing Up Divorced. She lives in Sagaponack, New York, with her husband, Harvey Loomis.

Mozart Among
the Giottos
Assisi, where Francis and Clare are born and Francis spends
his indulgent youth
1
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-fourteenthcentury
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
on the road with francis of assisi 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 received 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,
on the road with francis of assisi 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 Francisordered 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
Franci...