On the Road with Francis of Assisi (16 page)

Life must have seemed as sweet to Francis as Brother Jacopa’s sugared almonds when he and his friars left Rome to return to Assisi with the blessing of the Pope. They had become official men of God, with no boundaries set for the range of their preaching. Every soul in the world was theirs for the saving. They took their time, traveling north on the ancient Via Flaminia, which essentially parallels Italy’s major modern highway, the A1, through the hill towns of Orte and Narni.

In his jubilation, Francis preached to everyone and everything in sight. He believed all natural things to be creations of God, and along the way, he exhorted the flowers and the cornfields and the vineyards to praise and serve the Lord. He issued the same call to stones and forests and fountains of water and “the green things of the gardens,” as well as to earth, fire, wind, and air. And, in probably the best-known sermon of his life, he stopped on the way home to preach to the birds.

11

Desperately Seeking Francis and the Birds

P
IAN D
’A
RCA,
the elusive roadside shrine where Francis preaches to the birds ·
O
RTE
and
N
ARNI,
where he dallies ·
T
HE
M
ARMORE
F
ALLS,
where we hope he went ·
A
SSISI,
where his preaching wins Clare

T
he little stone shrine at Pian d’Arca stands on the road near Cantalupo north of Bevagna, across from a gas station. We miss it three times. Everyone we ask for directions—the roadside vendor just outside Bevagna slicing lunchtime pork from a whole roasted pig on a spit, the woman walking her dog along the road in Cantalupo—sends us back the way we have just come. Our problem is that we presume, after having seen the grandiose monuments surrounding Francis in Assisi, that this shrine, too, will be a megastructure. It isn’t.

The place where Francis first and famously preached to the birds turns out to be a lonely, simple, tree-shaded shrine by the road on the edge of a field. There is no parking lot, no sign, no nothing. It is not until we let ourselves into the low wrought-iron fence enclosure around the arched shrine and see its haloed painting of Francis with a bird on his shoulder, another on his hand, and still another flying toward him that we know we’re in the designated place for one of his best-known and most beloved legends.

Francis was on the road near Bevagna, possibly this one, when he saw a gathering of “a great multitude of birds,” including doves, crows, and magpies. He ran toward these common-a-day birds, symbolic of his own humility, and was surprised that they did not take flight, even when he walked among them. “Filled with great joy,” he then asked the birds to listen to the word of God.

According to Celano, Francis exhorted his “brother birds” to praise and love the Lord. “He gave you feathers to wear, wings to fly, whatever you need,” Francis told the attentive flock. “God made you noble among His creatures and gave you a home in the purity of the air.” The birds responded by stretching their necks and spreading their wings and welcoming his touches on their heads until he blessed them and gave them permission to fly away.

This charming story is one of the most re-created by artists, including Giotto in the basilica in Assisi and the fifteenth-century Florentine Benozzo Gozzoli in the San Francesco church-museum in nearby Montefalco. The sermon to the birds also spawned a new audience for Francis, who left the field chastising himself for having neglected animals. From then on, writes Celano, “he carefully exhorted all birds, all animals, all reptiles and also insensible creatures, to praise and love the Creator.”

The lovely legend appears to have drawn many others to this unassuming shrine on the side of the road. There are offerings of flowers in tin cans and an assortment of religious candles at the base of the shrine, partially obscuring the defining inscription, which begins:
“Questo luogo Santo Franceso insegnò le laudi di dio creatore.”
There are also acorns scattered on the ground, one of which I still carry in my coat pocket to recapture the image of Francis preaching to the birds.

We had come to the little shrine from Orte and Narni, the two hill towns named by his medieval biographers where Francis stopped on his way home to Assisi from Rome. Celano writes that he spent fifteen days in a “place near the city of Orte,” while another biographer, Julian of Speyer, writes that Francis spent forty days there. Regardless, the consensus is that Francis used the time not only to preach in Orte with his newfound license but to give his now legitimized friars a refresher course in humility and abstinence.

Francis reportedly sent his friars, one by one, into Orte, dramatically perched on a volcanic tuff cliff, to beg door to door for food. The lesson in humility was followed by a positive lesson in collective deprivation—Francis instructed his friars to share among themselves the small amount they had received “with gratitude and joyful hearts.” On the odd occasion that they had a crust or two of bread left over, writes Celano, they hid it in a “deserted and abandoned tomb, so they could eat it at another time.”

We choose not to hide our lunch but to eat our prosciutto-and-watercress sandwiches in a cobbled minipark at the top of the small stone city. A young boy is whizzing around on his training-wheels bicycle, which suggests one of the miracles Francis performed in Orte. An unfortunate medieval boy was so crippled that his head was bent to his knees until Francis made the sign of the cross over him and the boy uncoiled. Francis also rid a man of a tumor “the size of a large loaf of bread” by blessing him. As I sit on a bench, lulled by the autumn sun and the bucolic view over Orte’s surrounding fields, it all seems possible.

Francis ambled on toward home through Narni, the most southern medieval hill town in Umbria, fifteen miles beyond Orte. The Rough Guide describes Narni as an “intimate and unspoilt hill-town” with a “stage-set medievalism.” We achieve center stage of that medieval set by following the Via Garibaldi, the original route of the ancient Via Flaminia on which Francis must have entered Narni; through the Piazza Garibaldi, from whose medieval cistern under the central fountain Francis might have drunk; past the cathedral, whose eleventh- and twelfth-century façade Francis definitely saw; then through a Roman arch into the Piazza dei Priori, Narni’s small and quiet civic center, rimmed entirely by old palazzos. I could have spent weeks in the piazza’s outdoor café, situated across from the intricately carved exterior stone pulpit from which St. Bernardino of Siena, a fifteenth-century Franciscan friar, railed against the biblical evil of usury.

Chatting with the other people at the café, including a retired doctor from Foligno who warns us not to trust anyone from Perugia, I visualize Francis entering the medieval piazza to preach. The people would naturally gather around the strange little man, who starts off by wishing them peace, then moves quickly into saving their souls. He is a troubadour and entertains the crowd by singing to them in French, often accompanying himself by strumming a stick to imitate a lute; he’s an actor, whirling this way and that and gesturing wildly with his arms while he promises redemption; he’s a man of God, but unlike the stuffy priests who preach in Latin, he speaks to the people in their own language. And he seems genuine. Unlike the corrupt priests who condemn sin but father children and who grow fat while others starve, Francis obviously practices the poverty he preaches—just look how emaciated he is in his rags—and he is clearly in love—with Jesus.

No wonder people imbued him with otherworldly powers. Celano recounts at least two miracles Francis performed in Narni—the curing of a paralytic who could “only move his tongue and blink his eyes” and the restoration of sight to a blind woman. Other miracles would cure people from Narni after his death: a crippled orphan restored to health after praying at Francis’s tomb; a sick boy cured after his mother pledged he would follow the spirit of Francis; a man crippled for six years made whole after he dreamed of Francis and felt his hands on his leg and foot.

The truth, however, is that Francis did not like performing miracles. He despised the resulting exaltation of him when, in fact, he believed such miraculous power came from the Lord; he was only the conduit. A perfect example occurred during a later preaching tour through the diocese of Narni, when Francis and three of his friars were invited to stay with a man of “very good reputation” whose unfortunate wife was possessed by a demon. Francis’s host quite naturally asked the guest to exorcise his wife’s demons—but humble Francis turned him down. “The blessed Francis preferred in his simplicity to be held in contempt rather than be lifted up by worldly honor for some display of holiness, so he refused,” Celano explains.

Francis’s abhorrence of “vainglory” is a constant theme in all the early stories about him, and this refusal to perform an act that would win him praise is no exception. But in this case he finally bowed to pressure from the husband’s friends. He placed his friars in the corners of the wife’s room so the devil could not hide in them, then, after praying, commanded the devil to depart the woman, who was “twisting miserably and screaming horribly.” It worked, in fact, too well. The devil abandoned the woman “with such swiftness and with such a furious roar” that Francis thought the devil had duped him. Overpowering the powerful demon could not have been so easy, and Francis quickly left, ashamed.

So convinced was Francis he had failed that on a subsequent visit he refused to speak to the grateful woman, who ran after him down the street, kissing his footprints, to thank him. Only after his friars and her friends intervened and convinced him that he had indeed delivered the woman from the devil did Francis relent and speak to her.

Francis is still very much a presence in Narni, so much so that we are lucky to have prebooked a room over the Internet in the Hotel dei Priori just off the piazza. A convention of Franciscan historians is about to descend on the town, after having attended the beatification ceremonies for Mother Teresa in Rome, and they take over every available hotel room, including those of the charming dei Priori.

That they are coming to Narni is not surprising. One of the most important hermitages Francis founded, Sant’Urbano, is nearby. Tradition holds that Francis first stayed at the already existing Benedictine monastery in 1209 on his way back to Assisi from his triumphant visit with Pope Innocent III and soon established a Franciscan hermitage there. He and his original friars would stay at Sant’Urbano often on their way to and from Rome, and subsequent generations of Franciscan friars would maintain a presence there for the next three hundred years.

I am obviously eager to see the medieval monastery, but this time I want to make sure I know what I will be seeing. My Italian is simply not good enough to communicate confidently with some of the enthusiastic friars we have met at other hermitages, so this time I have e-mailed ahead to the tourist office in Narni to inquire whether there is an English-speaking friar at Sant’Urbano and, if not, to engage a translator.

The young woman in Narni’s tiny, one-person tourist office, I quickly discover, has outdone herself. Yes, indeed, there is an English-speaking friar at the hermitage, she tells me, and he is expecting us. And to make our visit there even more fruitful, she has translated into English an entire book for me on Francis at Sant’Urbano. I am dumbfounded by her generosity and enormous investment of time in the translation—but then I read it. Though her English is certainly better than my Italian, sentences like “if us put out from the wall of town-walls of small courtyard the open, here perhaps, down under, the mountain road for which Francis reached to you,” and “Come you instead six here” do not shed much light on Francis at Sant’Urbano. But we are reassured by the promise of the English-speaking friar. Wrong again.

We achieve the hermitage in a mountain forest high above the morning mist and are greeted in the stone courtyard by an expectant Father Paolo. “Ah, Inglese, Inglese,” the cheerful Italian friar says in welcome and rushes off to return with Brother John Lee, an English-speaking Korean friar from Seoul. Only he barely speaks English. I think he tells us that he is one of 170 Franciscan friars at the Seoul convent and is a guest of the three Italian friars in residence at Sant’Urbano, but who knows? The charming young man hands me an Italian-language guide to the sanctuary, which I can’t read and he can’t either. Faced with my questions, he darts away and returns with his own Korean-language guide to the sanctuary, which he tries gamely to translate into English. And so, haltingly but with good cheer, we begin our escorted tour of Sant’Urbano.

It is a magical and historic sanctuary, which has served as a spiritual refuge for countless saints dating back to 1000. We wend our way through the pots of miniature pomegranates in the courtyard and past an ancient well with its rusty water bucket into the tiny chapel of San Silvestro. It is easy to conjure up Francis praying and attending mass with his original friars in this simple stone chapel, which couldn’t hold more than twenty people. Saints, including John the Evangelist, Silvester, Girolamo, Catherine of Alexandria (who is immortalized at St. Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai Desert), and of course, Francis and Clare, march through the restored fourteenth-century frescoes.

We move on in time through the fourteenth-century Franciscan cloister to the timber-roofed refectory, where the resident friars ate their meager meals at the old plank tables. Upstairs are the convent cells established by St. Bernardino of Siena, and back across the courtyard is the sanctuary’s “modern” sixteenth-century church, with its carved wooden choir or
coretto
used by the later friars.

But we have come to see Francis at Sant’Urbano, and with a big smile, Brother John leads us into the
Cisterna dell’Acqua,
the site of one of Francis’s most famous miracles. A well, rimmed by four upright paving stones in the floor of the big, vaulted room, and the rusty old helmet on the wall tell the story of the
Miracolo del Vino,
or the Miracle of the Wine. On one visit to Sant’Urbano, a seriously ill and weak Francis yearned for some wine, but the friars told him there was none. So Francis asked instead for water, which they fetched by dipping the helmet into the well.

Francis, who must have enjoyed performing this miracle, made the sign of the cross over the water, and presto, it turned into wine—and snatched him back from the jaws of death. “At the taste of it, he recovered so easily that it became evidently clear that the desired ‘drink’ was given to him by a bountiful Giver not as much to please his sense of taste as to be efficacious for his health,” St. Bonaventure writes. The healing power of the miraculous water evidently lived on; four hundred years later, water from the same well was dispensed among the people suffering from the pestilence of 1686 and saved many lives.