On the Road with Francis of Assisi

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 Franci
s
’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 Bisho
p
’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 Franci
s
’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.