On the Road with Francis of Assisi
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I rush after the priest to ask about the letter and deduce from his torrent of Italian, arm waving, and finger pointing that the letter is somewhere up the steps at the top of the piazza, in the Museo Diocesano. It takes us another half an hour to find the little yellow sign near an arch on the Via Aurelio Saffi that leads us to Sant’Eufemia, Spoleto’s revered twelfth-century church, and the museum’s central courtyard.
I am so intent on finding the letter that I barely glance at what surely are treasures in the museum’s five rooms, and suddenly, there is the letter, displayed in a glass case rimmed in silver and mounted on red marble. Turns out that the document is on loan from the cathedral for a monthlong Umbria-wide exhibition of Franciscan artifacts.
It is an extraordinary feeling to see once again Francis’s actual handwriting, especially so well displayed and lit. Francis wrote the letter, in Latin, toward the end of his life, when his eyesight was failing, which accounts for the painfully shaky script and the irregular lines. But it is a remarkable and tender document written to Brother Leo during a troubled period in Leo’s life.
Brother Leo, [wish] your Brother Francis health and peace. I speak to you, my son, as a mother. I place all the words which we spoke on the road in this phrase, briefly, and [as] advice. And afterwards, if it is necessary for you to come to me for counsel, I say this to you: In whatever way it seems best to you to please the Lord God and to follow His footprints and His poverty, do this with the blessing of God and my obedience. And if you believe it necessary for the well-being of your soul, or to find comfort, and you wish to come to me, Leo, come!
Historians differ on where Francis was when he wrote this letter. All agree, however, that Francis was at one of the many mountaintop hermitages to which he would often withdraw to pray and meditate, one of which, on the sacred mountain of Monteluco, is just five miles from Spoleto. And utterly charming.
To even begin to understand Francis of Assisi, it is critical to leave the museums and cathedrals and the hill towns to go, as he did, to the hermitages. After his conversion, he would divide his time between preaching in the towns and retreating to the mountaintops, where he fasted and prayed in isolation and often talked directly with God. “The world was tasteless to him who was fed with heavenly sweetness, and the delights he found in God made him too delicate for the gross concerns of man,” writes Celano. “He always sought a hidden place where he could adapt not only his soul but also all his members to God.”
The hermitage Francis would found in 1218 on top of the 2,650-foot-high Monteluco is well worth the hairpin turns and narrowing road that lead us above the clouds and the smoke from fires farmers in the valley have set to burn off the rubble on their fall fields. We make one false stop, at what looks like an ancient convent but turns out to be a pizza restaurant adjoining the twelfth-century church of San Giuliano. The restaurant is not yet open for dinner, but an obliging waitress brings us espressos, which we sip gratefully in front of a television set tuned in to Milionario, the Italian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
The “hidden” hermitage, when we finally achieve the mountain’s level summit, turns out to be inside a Franciscan convent tucked into the sheer face of the far side of the mountain, with a view of the Spoleto Valley normally reserved for those flying in small planes. Hardly a ruin, the fifteenth-century convent that grew up around the primitive hermitage looks newly restored, with a shiny carved wooden door leading into a beautiful cobbled courtyard bordered on one side by a small one-story, tile-roofed building.
Big ceramic pots of grasses and geraniums dot the courtyard and beyond, through an open door, a small and graceful cloister with a central—and miraculous—well. Local legend holds that Francis, in search of water, drew a spring of fresh water from a rock. Adding to this magical scene is a young Franciscan friar chatting with a young woman at the doorway of the convent. “Buona sera,” they welcome us as we step through the door into a corridor and follow a sign that reads “1218 Primitivo Convento.” It turns out to be as close to Francis as we ever get.
This quintessential Franciscan hermitage consists of seven crude and tiny wooden cells, each barely five feet long and wide, that Francis and his friars built along the edge of the mountain next to a twelfth-century chapel dedicated to St. Catherine of Alexandria. The cells are not gussied up, as are so many of the Franciscan sites in Assisi, but are as simple and stark as the life Francis set out to live. It is easy to imagine him here, stooping slightly to enter the four-foot-high door, sleeping on the wooden plank that remains in one of the cells, looking out the small casement window to nothing but sky. How much farther from the “world,” as Francis called it, could he get?
He is just as present in the “Sacred Grove” outside the convent, where we follow a path through a stand of giant ilex whose roots radiate aboveground, some high enough to sit on, for at least thirty feet. The ancient Romans decreed the mountain a holy place because of these trees and limited their cutting to one day a year. A replica of the third-century B.C. order carved in stone just inside the entrance to the Sacred Grove (the original is in the Archaeological Museum in Spoleto) warns in archaic Latin that anyone disobeying the order must pay a fine and sacrifice an ox to Jove.
Francis would have approved of the Roman sentiment to protect the trees, though he would also have championed the protection of “Brother” Ox. I feel much closer to Francis in this natural sanctuary of peace and beauty, as I would in all the hermitages we visit, than I do in the hill towns, including Spoleto and even Assisi. The old towns, though beautifully preserved for the most part, are up-to-date communities where the residents watch television, park their cars, talk on their cell phones. It is easier to picture Francis in the more ageless surroundings of nature, praying without interruption or distraction and walking with his friars under the canopy of the trees.
The sound of guitar music drifting out of the convent lures us back into the courtyard. A friar named Angelo is on his way to the 6:00 P.M. Dominus prayers and invites us to accompany him. Regretfully, we decline. The sun is setting in brilliant streaks of burnt orange, and we have to navigate back down the narrow, winding mountain road to Spoleto. But we can’t help lingering outside the window of the little building as the friars inside begin to sing a chant—“Alleluia … alleluia”—the same chant Francis and his friars might have intoned here more than eight centuries ago.
Francis was not feeling as harmonious when he was well enough to return to Assisi from Spoleto in the spring of 1205. Gone was his dream of becoming a knight, and he had, as yet, no other dream to replace it. He evidently sold his armor en route and arrived home, most probably, in humiliation. Celano does not record Pietro Bernadone’s reaction to his son returning without the glory and status of knighthood—and without the armor he had paid so dearly for. The assumption has to be that Pietro was furious at his son, who presumably pocketed at least some of the money for the armor, because soon after he arrived home Francis was back out on the street with a full purse, entertaining his friends.
Francis was such a soft touch it seems inevitable that, soon after he returned from Spoleto, his friends chose him to be “king” of Assisi’s revels, a traditional summerlong debauch of eating, drinking, and carousing—which Francis bankrolled. “He was chosen by them to be their leader, for since they had often experienced his liberality, they knew without a doubt that he would pay the expenses for them all,” Celano writes. It was out of the “obligations of courtesy,” Celano claims, that Francis hosted one final “sumptuous banquet, doubled the dainty foods; filled to vomiting with these things, they defiled the streets with drunken singing.”
But something happened to Francis that early summer night that began his conversion and made that feast his last. According to all his biographers, he was struck dumb and unable to move, remaining rooted on the street while his friends went on. They came back for him when they realized he was missing and interpreted his trancelike state as a fit of lovesickness. “Francis, do
you wish to get married?” his friends teased him. Jolted back to consciousness, Francis gave the reply that is central to his legend. “I shall take a more noble and more beautiful spouse than you have ever known,” he told them, according to Celano. “She will surpass all others in beauty and will excel all others in wisdom.”
Francis’s vision of his coming betrothal to “Lady Poverty” is commemorated at a festival every year in Assisi during the week following the first Tuesday in May. Eight hundred years ago it marked the moment when he began his conversion from sinner to saint.
Mount Subasio rises steeply above Assisi, its oak, pine, and ilex forests laced with caves and streams and hiking trails. Two and a half miles up a very steep pilgrim footpath from Assisi’s Porta Cappuccini, or by car on the Via Santuario delle Carceri, is the Eremo delle Carceri, one of the earliest Franciscan hermitages and a refuge, for hundreds of years before that, for hermits and priests fleeing persecution from eastern Europe.
Francis was not fleeing persecution from anyone when he first sought out this lovely, serene spot, but confronting himself. The carceri, or prison, is believed to be the location of the cave he secretly frequented with an unidentified friend after seeing the vision of Lady Poverty that night on the streets of Assisi.
The beginning of Francis’s conversion from playboy to penitent “in a certain grotto near the city,” according to Celano, was a slow, painful process. Francis spent long hours on his knees praying to God to hear again the voice that had instructed him to return to Assisi to await the vision that promised him “spiritual fulfillment”—but there was only silence and Francis’s considerable guilt. “He repented that he had sinned so grievously and had offended the eyes of God’s majesty,” writes Celano, “and neither the past evils nor those present gave him any delight.”
But Francis was still of this “world,” and not yet fully confident that he would be able to resist the temptations of the flesh. According to the Legend of the Three Companions, the devil took advantage of his uncertainty by tempting him with a horrible image. There was, in Assisi, a “humpbacked and deformed woman and the Devil recalled her to Francis’s mind with the threat, that unless he turned from the good he had embarked on, he would free her from her deformity and cast it upon him.”
That image, and other “inopportune ideas,” plagued Francis in the cave and “greatly worried and distressed him.” The struggle within himself evidently took a considerable toll. He couldn’t rest, and he often wept for hours. “Consequently, when he came out again to his companion, he was so exhausted with the strain, that one person seemed to have entered, and another to have come out,” notes Celano.
There are no devils at the carceri during our visits. On one occasion we meet a small group of elderly nuns from Germany, clambering with some difficulty up and down the narrow, slippery paths to the caves marked by the names of Francis’s first followers—Brothers Leo, Rufino, Silvester, and Masseo—and to the now enclosed grotto overlooking a gorge where Francis prayed and slept. “Grüss Gott,” each nun greets us. “Grüss Gott.”
Along Leo’s path we also we meet up with a group of Franciscan academicians from America, some forty of them, who are touring Umbria’s Franciscan sites under the auspices of www.franciscanpilgrimages.com. Their leader, Father John, is explaining the significance of a curious bronze sculpture grouping of three life-size friars looking up at the sky.
Some of the early Franciscans were scientists, he explains, and among the first to study nature. One of the bronze friars looks heavenward trying to identify the North Star. Another is measuring the distance between the stars with his hand. The third is lying on his back on the ground, smiling, with his hands under his head. “That’s St. Francis,” Father John says, “just looking up at all the stars and having a delightful time.”
Legends abound along the shaded paths of the carceri—the well in the courtyard, which Francis successfully coaxed to fill with water, the riverbed he would empty after a storm because the sound of the rushing water interfered with his prayers, the tree supposedly from the time of Francis that still clings to the side of the precipitous ravine with the aid of metal stakes and guy wires. Birds evidently gathered regularly in the tree to sing to Francis and just as regularly fell silent at his polite request when he wanted absolute quiet to pray.
We retrace our steps to the courtyard to a tiny chapel with a smoke-blackened ceiling the early friars built in a cave. Along the way we run into a Swiss family wearing sturdy hiking boots and carrying walking staffs. They have just come down a very steep path marked “Sister Moon,” a clearing high in the woods from which the early friars observed the skies, and they are breaking out protein bars to fuel them on the equally steep footpath back to Assisi.
We leave the carceri with some reluctance, unlike Francis, who must have been relieved to distance himself from his early travails with his conscience in the cave. He was making headway, and “his heart was aglow with divine fire,” notes the Legend of the Three Companions, but he still had not heard any instructions from the “voice” of Spoleto. Instead, he began to redirect his life on his own. “He was already a benefactor of the poor, but from this time onwards he resolved never to refuse alms to anyone who begged in God’s name, but rather to give more willingly and abundantly than ever before.”
His preoccupation with the poor spilled over into his home life. His mother, Lady Pica, who is described by all the early chroniclers as deeply religious, was far more sympathetic to Francis’s new charity than was his father. Famine was rampant around Assisi following the devastation of the countryside’s crops by a storm, and the number of hungry and starving had increased dramatically. When Pietro Bernadone was away, as he frequently was, Lady Pica went along with Francis’s request to bake extra loaves of bread for the beggars who came to the door. And she presumably supported or at least turned a blind eye to his new habit of giving away his clothes to the poor when he found himself with no money. “He would give his belt or buckle, or if he had not even these, he would find a hiding place and, taking off his shirt, give it to the beggar for love of God,” reports the Legend of the Three Companions.
Seeing the change in her son and the “new ardor which was taking possession of him and filling him with repentance for his past grave sins,” Lady Pica, perhaps, was the one who urged Francis to go on pilgrimage to Rome in that same life-altering year of 1205. It was a long trip, some 120 miles, and it is not known whether he walked or rode on horseback. But no matter. The important part of the legend is what happened to Francis when he got there.
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The Old Rome
ROME, where Francis identifies with the beggars · SAN DAMIANO, where he finally hears a message from the Lord · FOLIGNO, where he acts on that message—with dramatic results
St. Peter’s Basilica looms ever larger from the Via della Conciliazione, the grandiose, column-lined boulevard Mussolini built to the Vatican in the 1930s by razing a medieval neighborhood. We hike across the basilica’s vast and familiar Piazza San Pietro, where thousands of empty white plastic chairs await the faithful for the Pope’s weekly blessing. One hundred and forty sculpted saints march around the top of Bernini’s graceful colonnade rimming the sixteenth-century piazza, and I am warmed to see Francis among them.
If the scope of St. Peter’s is meant to humble mere mortals, it succeeds. Two-story-high marble sculptures of Jesus and his disciples look down on the piazza from the basilica’s imposing façade, while huge marble replicas of St. Peter and St. Paul flank the broad marble steps leading up to the basilica. The separation is appropriate given that the two saints had a falling-out in the earliest years of Christianity and rarely spoke to each other again.
For centuries St. Peter’s was the largest church in Christendom, until it was eclipsed in 1990 by Our Lady of Peace in Yamoussoukro, the capital of the Ivory Coast. But no matter. It is to St. Peter’s in Rome that Catholic pilgrims, including Francis, have always journeyed from all over the world.
Moreover, Peter, like Christ, had accepted, even sought out, his martyrdom. He and other Christians had been wrongly accused and subsequently persecuted by Emperor Nero for having caused the fire that engulfed Rome in A.D. 64. Legend has it that Peter had escaped Nero’s jail in Rome and was on his way out of town to safety when he met a man on the Via Appia and asked him the famous question “Quo vadis?” When the man replied that he had come to be crucified for a second time, Peter realized he was speaking to Christ and immediately turned around to go back to Rome—and his certain death.
That such a man should be so poorly served at his own grave caused Francis to all but empty his purse at the altar. “Astounded when he came to the altar of the prince of the apostles that the offerings of those who came there were so meager, he threw down a handful of coins at that place, thus indicating that he whom God honored above the rest should be honored by all in a special way,” writes Celano.
The sacred basilica Francis was visiting, the “old” St. Peter’s, was built by Constantine, the first Christian-convert emperor, at the beginning of the fourth century over the necropolis where the martyred Peter had been buried. The “new” and current St. Peter’s would be built on the same site thirteen centuries later. Tradition holds that both the Papal altar in today’s St. Peter’s, framed by Bernini’s hundred-foot-tall canopy of bronze (stolen and melted down from the Pantheon’s portico), and the more modest altar in the “old” St. Peter’s were sited directly over Peter’s grave. It is intriguing to think some of the coins from Francis’s purse may be among the assortment found during a subterranean search for Peter’s remains; early pilgrims to the old St. Peter’s evidently dropped coins directly into the grave through a grille in the marble slab covering it.