On the Road with Francis of Assisi

by Linda Bird Francke

  Having made his dramatic offering to St. Peter, Francis left the basilica as he had entered it—through an enclosed garden known as Paradise. But the atrium hardly fit the definition of Paradise, filled as it was with beggars and the poorest of the poor pleading for a coin or two. Francis surely gave the poor what coins he had left, but the gesture was suddenly not enough for him.

  Instead he stopped among the beggars and committed one of the famous acts of his ongoing conversion—he swapped his fancy clothes with a beggar for his rags and found they suited him. “He put off his fine garments out of love of poverty, clothed himself with the garments of a certain poor man, and joyfully sat among the poor in the vestibule before the church of St. Peter,” writes Celano.

  This, presumably, was the first time Francis had actually cross-dressed with the poor. His biographers all make note of his increasing sense of charity toward the least fortunate and the various articles of clothing he had spontaneously taken off and given to others. But there is no indication that he had ever given away all his clothes and donned beggars’ rags in return—though he wanted to.

  Celano postulates that Francis had resisted the temptation because he was worried about what people in Assisi would think of his already strange behavior and waited to experiment until he was out of town. “Many times he would have done a similar thing had he not been held back by shame before those who knew him,” Celano writes.

  Safely away in Rome, Francis did not stop with the clothes exchange. He joined the beggars outside St. Peter’s and started begging for alms himself—in French. Though Francis certainly could have afforded to buy himself a good meal, he settled down with his new friends to share their scraps of food. “Considering himself one of them,” notes Celano, “he ate eagerly with them.” Celano does not record how the beggars must have felt having this seemingly crazy man enter their midst, don their rags, and eat their stale crusts with relish, but Francis probably felt the first stirrings of the pleasure, and ultimate freedom, of doing without. He was still playing a role, however. He wasn’t a true poverello—yet.

  Francis came closer on the way home to Assisi, where he confronted his greatest nightmare, as in a different sense do we. Ours occurs on the ancient Via Flaminia, the Roman road linking Rome with the Adriatic coast, as it passes through the southern industrial city of Terni. We have every intention of stopping in this modern bus and train hub to find the little twelfth-century church of San Cristoforo, where Francis preached in his later years, and the stone he stood on outside the bishop’s residence. But we are foiled by a soccer game.

  The rush-hour traffic inside Terni is gridlocked by the large police contingent double-and triple-parked along the streets to oversee the regional soccer game about to take place in the city’s stadium. Our nightmare begins when a convoy of police cars, lights flashing and sirens screaming, tries to force a busload of players through our car into the stadium parking lot. It is compounded when yet another flashing, screaming police car suddenly roars out of the parking lot and fetches up half an inch from my side of our car. We can’t move forward or back, despite the sirens and flashing lights. When we finally manage to extricate ourselves from Terni, vowing never to return, I try to dispel my negative feelings about the city by reminding myself it is the birthplace of St. Valentine.

  Francis met his nightmare farther along that same road when he came face-to-face with a leper. Of all the diseases for which there was no cure at the time, leprosy was the most vile, mutilating, and feared. It was believed to be highly contagious, so that anyone with skin ulcers, suppurating sores either from leprosy or from other skin diseases like St. Anthony’s fire from eating contaminated grains, was forcibly quarantined for forty days in leprosariums, or lazzaretti, before being allowed into any of the walled cities.

  Assisi had several such leprosariums nearby, places of such horror to Francis that, like most of his fellow citizens, he went far out of his way to avoid them. His fear of lepers was so strong, according to the Legend of the Three Companions, that “if, by chance, he happened to pass anywhere near their dwellings or to see one of the lepers, even though he was moved to give them alms through some intermediate person, he would nevertheless turn his face away and hold his nose.”

  It is not surprising, then, that the story of Francis and the leper he encountered on the road just outside Assisi became one of the legendary turning points of his conversion. In one of the agonizing sessions in the cave outside Assisi during which he’d pleaded with God to tell him what do, God had evidently given him an answer in the form of a riddle: “O Francis, if you want to know my will, you must hate and despise all that which hitherto your body has loved and desired to possess,” recounts the Legend of the Three Companions. “Once you begin to do this, all that formerly seemed sweet and pleasant to you will become bitter and unbearable; and instead, the things that formerly made you shudder will bring you great sweetness and content.”

  So, coming face-to-face with the leper, the source of his greatest shudder, really put it to Francis. He knew what he wanted to do, but this time, remembering God’s admonition, he did not flee from the shrouded, stinking, rattle-shaking miserable or turn his face or hold his nose. “Though the leper caused him no small disgust and horror,” records Celano, “nevertheless, lest like a transgressor of a commandment he should break his given word, he got off the horse and prepared to kiss the leper.”

  Celano then adds a mystical dimension to the encounter, writing that when Francis remounted his horse and looked back at the leper, “though the plain lay open and clear on all sides, and there were no obstacles about, he could not see the leper anywhere.” Whatever the truth of this story, the historical reality is that for the rest of his life Francis would seek out leprosariums and lavish attention on their wretched inmates with such intimacy that it is widely believed he eventually caught the disease. “He washed all the filth off them and even cleaned out the pus of their sores,” writes Celano.

  Francis evidently saw lepers as a gift sent to him by God as a test of his humility. In his Testament, written shortly before he died, Francis said: “When I was yet in sin, it seemed too bitter for me to see lepers, and the Lord led me among them and I showed mercy to them.” His ongoing dedication to lepers would play a central role not only in his life but also in the lives of others who wanted to join his order. “When postulants presented themselves, whether nobles or commoners, they were forewarned that among other things they would have to serve the lepers and live in their hospitals,” records the Legend of Perugia.

  We drive the short distance from Assisi to the site of one of those hospitals, San Salvatore della Parte, now a rather elegant, privately owned building called the Casa Gualdi. It sits near a crossroads on the old and well-traveled Via Francesca, the Road of the French, so named because it was the trade and pilgrimage route between Assisi, Rome, and France. But aside from a plaque on the building identifying it as a historic Franciscan site, there is nothing to suggest the suffering of the medieval lepers who were confined there, or the role lepers played in changing Francis’s life. “Strengthened by God’s grace, he was enabled to obey the command and to love what he had hated and to abhor what he had hitherto wrongly loved,” notes the Legend of the Three Companions.

  It was the next directive from on high, however, in this same year of 1205, that started the sequence of events that would scandalize Assisi and catapult Francis along the road to sainthood. This one took place in a small, half-ruined, twelfth-century church named San Damiano, less than a mile from Assisi, tended by an old, itinerant priest. It was not the priest who transformed Francis the day he wandered into San Damiano, but the twelfth-century Byzantine cross, painted by a Syrian monk, that hung over the altar. In one of the most critical moments in Francis’s life, recreated by Giotto in Assisi’s basilica, the crucified Jesus depicted on the cross spoke to Francis, some say even bowed to him, and repeated three times: “Francis, go, repair my house, which as you see, is falling completely to
ruin.”

  Francis must have been ecstatic finally to get the clear order promised him in the dream he had had months before, and he took the order literally. Rebuild this crumbling church. So that was what he was meant to do. But how? The reconstruction would take money, more money than he had. Where would he get it? Of course! His father’s shop. “After fortifying himself with the sign of the holy cross, he arose, and when his horse was made ready, he mounted it,” writes Celano. “Taking with him scarlet cloth to sell, he quickly came to a city called Foligno.”

  Foligno surprises us. The once-thriving medieval market town nine miles east of Assisi (and strategically located at the crossroads of the ancient Via Flaminia and a secondary but equally vital trade road connecting the town to Spello, Perugia, and Assisi) is so universally trashed in our guidebooks as a dreary industrial, agricultural, and transportation center that we dread going there. But we find the valley city surprisingly inviting. It is a relief to be walking on flat pavement after our stiff climbs around the hill towns and a welcome change to be on wide, pedestrian-only streets and not dodging cars.

  Our goal in Foligno is to find the medieval marketplace where Francis sold the “scarlet” cloth he had taken from his father’s shop and the horse he had taken from his father’s stable. It takes awhile. The obvious starting point is Foligno’s unexpectedly charming main Piazza della Repubblica with its funky twelfth-century duomo, whose carved façade boasts a pagan panoply of animals and signs of the zodiac. We step inside the church to hear a small group of worshipers singing harmoniously in a side chapel, but we see no sign of Francis.

  The Piazza San Domenico, at the far end of the old town down a flag-lined shopping street and past a Benetton, seems more promising. The piazza is big enough for a marketplace; it is shaded by oak trees and close to an ancient city gate. It also has an unexpected treasure: the sunken, low, pink and white stone church of Santa Maria Infraportas, which bears a startling plaque identifying it as the “Mother Church of Foligno, established in 58 A.D.” This church, too, is said to have pagan origins and to be the venue of a conversion sermon delivered to local animists by none other than St. Peter.

  Surely Francis visited this little Romanesque church, with its recycled columns supporting the sunken portico. At the risk of sounding otherworldly, we feel him there. What we neither feel nor find, however, is any indication that this is the piazza where he sold his father’s cloth and horse.

  We retrace our steps to the Piazza della Repubblica and find consolation in an elegant pasticceria along the Via Garibaldi. The unassuming doorway opens into a cheerfully lit ancient stone vault with modern yellow and burgundy fleurs-de-lis frescoed on its ceiling and arches, and glass cases displaying irresistible tarts and pastries. Regulars are gathering for their nightly card game, and while we drink our caffè latte we watch them share the news of the day with some degree of envy. Our appreciation of Foligno is heightened further by the pasticceria’s manager, who gives us a parting present from the overflowing shelves of chocolates wrapped in gleaming gold, blue, red, and green wrappers.

  And then, of course, we see it. In the Piazza della Repubblica. Over a candy store. A plaque, fifteen feet off the ground, identifying the piazza we’d started from two hours before as the site of Francis’s signature transaction. Though we feel somewhat like chumps, we are also grateful. If we’d seen the plaque right away, we would not have explored the old town and seen the hauntingly old Santa Maria Infraportas and discovered the pasticceria that so typifies the serendipitous wonders of Italy.

  We leave Foligno in a cheerful mood, as presumably did Francis until he returned to San Damiano, on foot, with all the money he had made to repair it—and the priest refused to accept it. The priest was all too aware of Francis’s high-living reputation and interpreted the humble conversion he was professing as mockery. “It seemed to him that Francis, just the day before was living outrageously among his relatives and acquaintances and exalting his stupidity above others,” Celano writes. Francis somehow managed to persuade the priest at least to let him stay at the church, but the priest left the bag of money, untouched, in a windowsill “out of fear of Francis’s parents.” He was right to be afraid of Francis’s parents. And so, with good reason, was Francis.

  Freud could have written volumes about the father-son relationship in the ensuing struggle between Pietro and Francis Bernadone. And it began as soon as his father found out that Francis not only had sold the family’s fabric and horse but also had moved into the priest’s house at San Damiano. “Calling together his friends and neighbors, he [Pietro] hurried off to find him [Francis],” records the Legend of the Three Companions. But Francis was nowhere to be found. “When he [Francis] heard of the threats of his pursuers, foreseeing their arrival, he hid from his father’s anger by creeping into a secret cave which he had prepared as a refuge.”

  Francis hid from his father in that “secret cave” for a month. Someone, no one knows who (I think it was his mother), brought him food while he “prayed continually with many tears that the Lord would deliver him from such persecution.” And the Lord did, after a fashion. The Francis who voluntarily emerged at last from the cave was a changed man, “glowing with inner radiance … ready to face the insults and blows of his persecutors.” And he got them.

  One can only imagine the reaction on the streets of Assisi when Francis returned “light-heartedly” from his month underground, dressed in rags, pale, emaciated—and smiling. “When his friends and relatives saw him, they covered him with insults, calling him a fool and a madman, and hurling stones and mud at him.” Not surprisingly, and perhaps accurately, they thought “he must be out of his mind.” His father certainly did.

  Pietro Bernadone shoved his way through the crowd stoning his son, but instead of protecting him, he “sprang on his son like a wolf on a lamb; and, his face furious, his eyes glaring, he seized him with many blows and dragged him home.” The excavated cell still visible in the designated remains of the Bernadone house in Assisi became a torture chamber for Francis. “For many days, his father used threats and blows to bend his son’s will, to drag him back from the path of good he had chosen, and to force him to return to the vanities of the world,” notes the Legend of the Three Companions. He failed.

  Francis held fast, in the age-old Christian tradition of enduring physical trials and overcoming temptations. When his father was called away on business, his mother tried to reason with him in a more gentle manner, but Francis rebuffed her entreaties as well. And then she did what any caring mother would do: “When she saw that his mind was irrevocably made up and that nothing would move him from his good resolution, she was filled with tender pity, and, breaking his bonds, she set him free.”

  But Pietro was not through with his son. Soon after he returned to Assisi, and roundly beat his wife for freeing Francis, he went to the local civil authority and formally charged his son with robbery. “When the authorities saw how enraged Pietro was, they sent a messenger to summon Francis,” continues the Legend of the Three Companions. But Francis had inherited his father’s shrewdness and summarily rejected the civil complaint, claiming that he was “the servant only of God and therefore no longer owed obedience to the civil authorities.”

  The stalemate must have been a relief to the city fathers, who wanted nothing to do with the domestic dispute, but it did nothing to appease Pietro. Instead he went to the bishop of Assisi and “repeated his accusation.” In turn, Bishop Guido, who is described in the Legend of the Three Companions as “a wise and prudent man,” summoned Francis to answer his father’s indictment. Francis agreed to “willingly appear before the Lord Bishop who is the father and lord of souls.” And the stage was set for the final and most dramatic confrontation between father and son—and Assisi’s most famous scandal.

  5

  Showdown in Assisi

  ASSISI, where Francis repudiates his father and is reborn · THE SAN VERECONDO MONASTERY, where he nearly dies · GUBBIO, where he is save
d · ASSISI, where he returns to rebuilding San Damiano

  Assisi’s small, tree-lined Piazza del Vescovado is a study of serenity on a fall afternoon. The leaves dapple the sunlight onto the central fountain and the quiet cobblestones in front of Santa Maria Maggiore, Assisi’s first cathedral; next to it is the bishop’s age-old and renovated residence. Surprisingly, neither the simple old Romanesque church, with its recessed brick vault and fragments of frescoes, nor the bishop’s unassuming walled residence merits much of a mention in the guidebooks to Assisi, though both are central to the legend of Francis. Perhaps it is because there are no tourist trattorias in the piazza and most of it is given up to parking spaces. The only other people we see are young French backpackers looking for an inexpensive room in a lovely old Franciscan residence run by nuns across from Santa Maria Maggiore. It is full.

  Vescovado was hardly a study of serenity in the spring of 1206, when Francis and Pietro Bernadone finally squared off there—for good. Some historians set the father-son confrontation in the Piazza del Comune, others in the piazza fronting San Rufino, but the majority point to little Vescovado. The showdown took place in and around the bishop’s residence, which was in the same location in 1206 as is the current residence today. So this is where we have come to reenact in our imaginations the drama of epic proportions.

  Picture Pietro, the father and accuser, glowering with accumulated rage at the loss of his money and fury at his stubborn, undeserving son. Imagine Francis, the crazy son and thief, arriving at the bishop’s residence smiling and laughing, joyfully obeying the bishop’s commands while ignoring those of his father. Imagine the crowd of gossipy Assisians gathered to witness the living soap opera of the Bernadone family. Some say that even young Clare was among the crowd that spring day, which, though a tantalizing possibility, seems doubtful, given her youth and her family’s high position.