On the Road with Francis of Assisi (21 page)

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, Leonardo, 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.

After a last, nostalgic cappuccino at the Caffè Meletti, we leave Ascoli via the Roman bridge over the River Tronto. Francis performed a miracle here, saving a man who had fallen into the river, but our crossing is uneventful. We are bound, via the elegant palace city of Urbino (through which Francis may or may not have passed), to the most important—and well documented—town Francis visited in the Marches: San Leo.

To see San Leo is to blink and think your eyes are deceiving you. It does not seem possible that a town could exist on top of a rock spur that rises over nineteen hundred feet—the equivalent of a twenty-three-story building—straight, and I mean straight, up from the surrounding plain. That Dante modeled his version of Purgatory on the terrain of San Leo seems completely apt. And here we are, at its formidable base, with road signs directing us to San Leo’s sky-scraping center as if it were just some ordinary destination. As we begin corkscrewing toward the summit on the road cut into the rock, I fight feelings of vertigo I never knew I had, and wish I had brought a parachute.

Francis was not intimidated but excited when he and Brother Leo reached the foot of San Leo in the spring of 1213. High above them, they were told by villagers, there was a celebration going on at the castle of Montefeltro to honor the knighting of one of the Montefeltro counts. The feasts and tourneys had drawn nobles from all over the region to San Leo, which Francis saw as a good recruiting opportunity. According to the
Little Flowers of St. Francis,
he said to Leo, “Let’s go up to that festival for with God’s help we will gather some good spiritual fruit.”

So up Francis went, as do we. He arrived in San Leo’s small main square, named after Dante, as do we. Our mirror dance continues when we check into the small Hotel Castello over a restaurant on the main square to discover that our windows overlook the elm tree and stone wall in a corner of the square where Francis addressed the assembled nobles. “And in fervor of spirit he climbed onto a low wall and began to preach,” the
Little Flowers
continues. Speaking, as ever, in the vernacular, Francis so electrified the partying nobles with his sermon of penance and deliverance that they fell silent and listened to him “as though an angel of God were speaking.”

Among the nobles in the piazza was Count Orlando, a “great and wealthy Count from Tuscany” who was already an admirer of Francis by reputation. The count was so moved after seeing and hearing Francis in person that he took him aside to discuss with him the “salvation of my soul.” Ever the diplomat and mindful that he had crashed the nobles’ party, Francis suggested that the count spend the day with his friends, “since they invited you to the festival,” and meet with him that night, after the feast.

The building in which they met that night, the Palazzo Nardini, turns out to be directly across the piazza from our hotel. But there is a problem. It is locked, and only the parish priest, Don Sergio, has the key. Romina, the Castello’s nice young owner, phones Don Sergio and makes a date for me to meet him at the legendary palazzo the next morning at 8:15. And thus begins an urgent search for an English-speaking interpreter.

Romina apologizes that she can’t do it; breakfast is a busy time at the Castello for locals going to work. Perhaps Francesca, across the square at the tobacco shop, can translate for me. Francesca is enthusiastic about the idea and anxious to practice her English—she is taking English lessons—but the tobacco shop is also very busy in the early morning and her ailing father cannot cover for her. Perhaps her English teacher can help. She’ll give him a ring. If that fails, the plan is for me to see the inside of the Palazzo Nardini with the padre, then adjourn with him to the tobacco shop so Francesca can translate any questions I might have.

I already know the story of the all-important meeting between Francis and Count Orlando from Francis’s medieval biographers, but I do not want to miss a word or detail about where the meeting actually took place. This transaction would change not only Francis’s life but religious history.