On the Road with Francis of Assisi (3 page)

The tiny Chapel of the Magdalene at Fonte Colombo, a hermitage near Rieti, where another doctor vainly tried to cure Francis by searing his temples with a hot poker.
BELOW:
The Greek letter “Tau,” Francis’s symbol, was supposedly etched on the chapel’s window frame by Francis himself.

The Porta Ovile in Siena, through which Francis was carried, mortally ill, to the nearby sanctuary of
Alberino on his final journey home.

The medieval church of
San Stefano, in Assisi, whose bells rang spontaneously at the moment Francis died.

1

Mozart Amongthe Giottos

A
SSISI,
where Francis and Clare are born and Francis spends his indulgent youth

A
ssisi 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-fourteenth-century 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 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, 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 Francis ordered 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 Francis with an inscription by Brother Leo; and the original, six-foot-tall, colorfully painted Byzantine crucifix that, legend holds, spoke to Francis in the little ruined church of San Damiano in 1205 and started him on his life’s mission.

I leave the relics, feeling rather guilty at having any uncharitable thoughts. I have grown very fond of Clare and Francis in the course of my research, and looking at some of their personal artifacts, especially their old clothes, makes me feel like a voyeur rummaging, uninvited, through their closets.

I don’t have a clear, physical impression of Clare, but I do of Francis. To Celano’s everlasting credit, he provides a detailed portrait of Francis in his biography of the saint. Beyond his short stature, which a later examination of his bones would pinpoint at only five foot three, three inches shorter than the average medieval Italian man, Francis had a “cheerful countenance,” a “round” head, a face “a bit long,” a forehead that was “smooth and low,” “black” eyes, hair, and a beard, “not bushy.” His eyebrows were “straight,” his nose “symmetrical, thin and straight,” his ears “upright, but small,” his temples “smooth,” his lips “small and thin,” his teeth “set close together, even, and white.”

Celano goes on to describe this appealing-sounding man as having a “slender” neck, “straight” shoulders, “short” arms, “slender” hands, “long” fingers, “extended” fingernails, “thin” legs, and “small” feet. “His skin was very delicate, his flesh very spare,” Celano ends.

As we move on to see the other vestiges of Francis and Clare dotted around Assisi, it is extraordinary to think that we are walking on the same streets they did and seeing at least a few of the same medieval structures they did. The first-century Temple of Minerva in Assisi’s central Piazza del Comune, for example, is clearly visible in one of Giotto’s frescoes in Francis’s basilica. Now a secular Franciscan church, the pagan temple in their time was used as the local jail.

Not surprisingly, some visitors to Assisi, and not only the many pilgrims and religious groups, feel a deeply spiritual presence on these streets. One friend of mine spent a month here after being treated for cancer and returned home in a newly serene state of mind. Another friend, a Muslim diplomat, told me he had experienced a spiritual awakening in Assisi second only to one he had felt during a pilgrimage to Mecca.

But another aspect of Assisi is undeniably commercial. As uncomfortable a reality as it might be, Francis, and to a lesser extent Clare, is a profitable industry for Assisi. The only one, in fact. Besides the many restaurants and hotels supported by visitors to Assisi, shops all over town sell multisized replicas of the San Damiano cross, religious medals with Francis’s likeness on them, and his signature tau cross carved out of olive wood, which many visitors wear on leather cords around their necks.

Pottery shops sell ashtrays and plates with scenes from Francis’s life on them, and at least one bakery sells “Pane di San Francesco,” a local bread laced with the
limoncello
liqueur so popular in Italy. One shop even sells Umbrian wine with replicas of the saints by Simone Martini on the label—St. Francis on the red wine, St. Clare on the white.

The Francis we have come to know as a saint would have been disgusted by the money changing hands in his name. The Francis we know less well as a young man, however, would have welcomed the exchange and perhaps even profited from it.

Francis was born into an emerging merchant class to a mother who is thought to have been French and a successful Assisi fabric merchant, Pietro di Bernadone. Pietro amassed a sizable fortune bringing home embroidered silks and velvets and damasks from France, fashioning them into stylish clothes in his workshop, and selling them to the nobles and affluent burghers of Assisi. Consumerism was taking hold in the late twelfth century, a trend that marked the accumulation of fancy clothes and dress for status, rather than simpler clothes for warmth and practicality. Pietro added more to his coffers by investing in land around Assisi, amassing so many farms, orchards, meadows, and forests that it is believed he was one of the hill town’s larger landowners.

No one is absolutely sure where the Bernadone family lived in Assisi. Some historians believe they lived in a house known as the T.O.R. Casa Paterna near the Piazza del Comune. Others believe the family home was on the Vicolo Sup. San Antonio, also near the Piazza del Comune. The choice of that location is supported by the presence of a tiny, charming shrine with fading frescoes that has been called the Oratorio di San Francesco Piccolino since the thirteenth century and that, with unsubtle religious symbolism, bears a placard in Latin stating Francis was born here—in a stable.

The most generally recognized location of the Bernadone home, however, and the one marked on tourist maps, is under the seventeenth-century Chiesa Nuova, just south of the Piazza del Comune. With some excitement we walk the short distance to the house from the oratorio but find its semiexcavated remains quite dull. There is archaeological value in the subterranean section of the ancient cobbled street on which the house fronted and the presumed remains of Pietro Bernadone’s shop where Francis worked for his father selling cloth. But we don’t sense any presence there of Francis.