On the Road with Francis of Assisi

by Linda Bird Francke

  The hearing before Bishop Guido started uneventfully enough. There was no disputing the fact that Francis had taken and sold his father’s cloth and his horse without permission, that he had tried to give the money to the priest at San Damiano as a restoration fund, that his father wanted his son to give the money back. And that was just what Bishop Guido told Francis to do. “Your father is highly incensed and greatly scandalized by your conduct,” the bishop admonished Francis according to the Legend of the Three Companions. “If therefore you wish to serve God, you must first of all return him his money, which may indeed have been dishonestly acquired.”

  Francis was quick to obey—and to add a flourish of his own. “My Lord Bishop, not only will I gladly give back the money which is my father’s, but also my clothes,” he said. And with that, Francis briefly repaired into the bishop’s residence, took off all his clothes, laid the sack of money on top of them, and reappeared in the piazza in front of the bishop, his father, and the good folk of Assisi, stark naked.

  Standing there in the buff (or wearing a hair shirt, by some accounts), Francis then proceeded to sever all ties with his father in what has to be one of the greatest renunciation scenes of all time. Addressing the gawking and surely tittering crowd, Francis called out: “Listen all of you, and mark my words. Hitherto I have called Pietro Bernadone my father. But because I am resolved to serve God, I return to him the money on account of which he was so perturbed, and also the clothes I wore which are his; and from now on I will say ‘Our Father who art in heaven,’ and not Father Pietro di Bernadone.”

  What a devastating moment for Pietro. His son renouncing him as a father. For all of Assisi to see and hear. The son he had fed and clothed, the son he had ransomed from prison in Perugia, the son he had outfitted in vain as a knight, trained in his shop, maybe even loved. This same ungrateful son now telling him in front of his neighbors and customers that he, Pietro, was no longer his father. And doing it naked.

  Pietro presumably did not dwell on the symbolism of his son’s nudity, whether it was Francis’s emulation of Christ on the cross or his more literal return to his first birth, marking the beginning of his second. All Pietro saw was red. “His father rose up burning with grief and anger,” the Three Companions continues, gathered up the clothes and the bag of money, pushed his way through the hooting crowd, and went home.

  The mood of the crowd evidently shifted with Pietro’s abrupt departure. Suddenly it was he who became the object of collective scorn, for taking away his son’s clothes and leaving him standing there, shivering and naked, in the piazza. Francis’s biographers, whose sources were presumably not present at what they call “the spectacle,” claim that the same crowd which had jeered Francis minutes before—and would again—was moved to tears of “piety” by his predicament. It would fall to Bishop Guido to calm the crowd and end the “spectacle” by stepping forward and enveloping Francis in his mantle.

  This act, too, was given spiritual meaning. With Francis’s rejection of his earthly father and his embrace of an adopted heavenly father, it could only follow that the bishop would interpret the “spectacle” as “prompted by divine counsel,” and not human theater. From that moment, Francis’s biographers universally agree, the bishop of Assisi “became his helper, exhorting, encouraging, loving and embracing him with the depths of his charity.”

  Standing in the Piazza del Vescovado, I try to figure out just where the dramatic confrontation took place. In front of the old cathedral? Around the fountain? Then, on the wall of the bishop’s residence, I see a handwritten sign, “Aperto” (Open), for the Libreria Fonteviva inside the courtyard. We follow it to what turns out to be a spiritual bookstore. “Do you know where Francis renounced his father?” I ask the woman behind the desk and am stunned when she replies matter-of-factly: “In the next room, the Sala del Trono. Come. I’ll show you.” And with that, she unlocks the door and turns on the light in what looks like a conference room, fitted out with long tables, chairs, microphones—and a velvet throne for the bishop. “Right here?” I say incredulously. “Right here,” she replies, explaining that the piazza had been larger in Francis’s time and the room had been built over it.

  I am dumbfounded, standing on the exact spot where Francis had stood over eight hundred years ago and handed over his worldly goods to his father to start a new life. A huge painting of the scene covers the far wall of the Throne Room, which is hardly surprising. That same renunciation scene has been recreated not only by Giotto in the basilica but by every other artist and filmmaker attempting to document Francis’s life. But there I am, physically, at the heart of the family saga, which suddenly feels very real.

  What Francis did next is a matter of chronological choice. Determining exactly what he did and when and where he did it has proven impossible in many instances for modern historians because his medieval biographers were less interested in following a time line than they were in storytelling. The Legend of the Three Companions has Francis returning immediately to his work restoring San Damiano; Thomas of Celano, in his First Life of St. Francis, reports that he left Assisi in the direction of Gubbio, some say still naked, others say dressed in a simple workman’s tunic and mantle donated by the bishop’s gardener. We choose Celano and set off to follow Francis the thirty miles or so north to the hill town of Gubbio, though he had a much more difficult time getting there than we do.

  Thieves jumped Francis in a forest en route, while he was “singing praises to the Lord in French.” What the robbers hoped to glean from the bare-legged, tunic-clad man spouting French is questionable, but attack him they did, and “savagely.” When they demanded to know who he was and he replied, “I am the herald of the great King!” they beat the mad little fellow, took his cloak, and tossed his body into a snow-filled ditch. “Lie there, you stupid herald of God,” the thieves reportedly said to him before retreating back into the forest to await a more lucrative target. Unperturbed by the attack, young Francis managed to climb out of the snowy ditch, and “exhilarated and with great joy,” he set off again, singing loud praises to the Lord. But his travails were not over.

  To the everlasting chagrin of the monks at San Verecondo, a Benedictine monastery Francis came upon five miles south of Gubbio, little charity was given him. Though he was obviously in need of food and clothing and perhaps even medical attention, the monks gave him none and instead put him to work as a scullery boy in the kitchen. (One local legend even has him being held prisoner by the princes of Gubbio in a nearby castle, though I can’t imagine why.) When later Francis’s reputation as a man of God spread far and wide, the prior of the monastery begged his forgiveness and tried to make up for his harsh treatment. According to a late-thirteenth-century text written by one of San Verecondo’s monks, the monastery would “graciously” host Francis “quite often” over the years and supply food and apple wine for a subsequent gathering of his followers. But such was not the treatment he received in 1206.

  Unbelievably, San Verecondo is still there, just off the road to Gubbio. The first view of the old monastery, since renamed the Abbazia di Vallingegno, is so splendid that we pull off the road into a convenient photo opportunity site one hundred yards or so from the driveway. Who could resist the image of such a picture-perfect hilltop bell tower, church, and cloister buildings nestled in a grove of cypresses?

  We drive the short distance to the renovated abbazia to discover that its up-to-date hospitality is now available to everyone. Owned by a family in Gubbio and leased to a young couple from Rome, the old monastery is now an agriturismo inn and working farm with a website—www.abbaziadivallingegno.it. Francis could have e-mailed ahead to book any one of six apartments for seventy euro a day, take riding lessons, and survey from the swimming pool the beautiful country he’d just walked through.

  It is a beautiful, sunny morning, and we chat with a touring German family at the picnic table outside their rooms. In such a serene setting, it is hard to imagine the rather vicious miracle Francis had
gone on to perform at San Verecondo. Recounted by all his early biographers, it involves a lamb born at the monastery during one of his visits, and the lamb’s immediate demise from the “ravenous bite” of a “cruel sow.” Francis was so incensed at the pig for killing “brother lamb, innocent animal,” Jesus being known as the Lamb of God or Agnus Dei, that he put a curse on her. The pig was dead within three days. To further avenge the lamb, the monks threw the sow’s body into a ditch at the monastery, where it “dried up like a board” and did not become “food for any hungry creature.” So much for Sister Sow.

  Francis was far more charitable, in another San Verecondo legend, toward a killer wolf. There are many wolf stories, but the first emanated from that same monk’s medieval text. This quite benign version has a sick and frail Francis riding a donkey at twilight along the road to the monastery and being entreated not to proceed by local farmers because of the “ferocious wolves” in the area. Francis replied that he did not fear “Brother Wolf” because neither he nor his Brother Donkey had done any harm to him, and they completed their journey to San Verecondo intact.

  That same route from Assisi to what is now the Abbazia di Vallingegno may still be in existence today. A network of seven footpaths linking Assisi to the old monastery and beyond, to Gubbio, was opened for the millennium in 2000. Some pilgrims followed all or part of the thirty-mile Sentiero Francescano della Pace on foot, others on horseback.

  I walk the second leg, a beautiful three-mile track downhill from Pieve San Nicolo, a hamlet on a hill four miles north of Assisi, to the tiny two-building locality of Il Pioppi. It was on this leg, which winds through high fields of wild broom and then very steeply down through a forest, that Francis is thought by some historians to have been jumped by the thieves and to have sought refuge at the nearby abbey of Santa Maria Assunta. Others mark the site of the attack near Caprignone, a hill and ditch much nearer to Vallingegno, along the fifth leg of the Sentiero Francescano. Early Franciscans built a monastery and a still-standing church on the top of Caprignone hill to memorialize the event, which would seem to indicate that this was the crime scene.

  Sitting at the picnic table at the Abbazia di Vallingegno and looking out over the valley all the way to Mount Subasio, I wished I had walked farther in Francis’s footsteps along the Sentiero Francescano. I feel somewhat better when, later, an Italian friend who had walked the entire peace trail told me she had gotten hopelessly lost on the section leading to the old abbey.

  She was better off, however, than was Francis during his first, mean stay with the Benedictines at the monastery. “No mercy was shown to him,” Celano says flatly. Half starved and half naked—he had only a peasant shirt, according to Celano, and “wanted only to be fed at least some soup”—Francis was in desperate straits. He soon left the monastery, “not moved by anger but forced by necessity,” and found his way to Gubbio.

  There can be no more beautiful road in Italy than the approach to Gubbio. Up, up from the valley, curving through rough plowed fields, olive groves, then down and up again, through vineyards with neat rows of grapevines tied on triangular wooden frames. Finally, the walled, medieval city appears, tucked into Mount Ingino on the western rim of the already snowcapped Apennines.

  It is the fall truffle season in Gubbio, made clear in the parking lot near the church of San Francesco della Pace by a billboard advertising a two-month-long market and exhibition of tartufi bianchi, white truffles. The church is chiuso until the late afternoon, so we follow the promise of fresh truffles to Fabiani, a restaurant near the church on the Piazza Quaranta Martiri (so named for the forty “martyrs” of Gubbio shot by the Nazis in 1944), where the truffles, however delicious, are not bianco but negro, black. White or black, I feel a pang of guilt indulging in the local delicacy, remembering the hunger with which the half-starved Francis arrived here.

  Good fortune reportedly came his way from a merchant family named Spadalonga, who gave Francis the first charity he’d received since he left Assisi—and perhaps even saved his life. Francis had befriended one of the Spadalonga sons, thought to be Federico, but nobody knows where or why. There is conjecture that they were imprisoned together in Perugia, that Federico was the unidentified friend who had accompanied Francis on his secret lamentations in the cave near Assisi, that Francis and young Spadalonga had met in a merchants’ guild.

  In any event, Federico’s act of charity was to give Francis a tunic and cloak to wear, replacing the inadequate rags that had obviously suffered on his perilous trip from Assisi. Presumably the family also gave him food and shelter, not only on that visit but on so many subsequent visits that the thirteenth-century church of San Francesco della Pace, the church we are waiting to enter, incorporated the Spadalongas’ home and warehouse, then outside the walls of Gubbio. The room Francis slept in is preserved just off the church’s sacristy in what is called the Chapel of Peace.

  The massive church, when it opens in the late afternoon, tells the story of the cloak giving over and over—in a stained glass window, in a bronze relief, in the inscription on a stone wall leading to the Chapel of Peace: “Qui presso il fondaco degli Spadalonga Francesco d’Assisi, evangelista della pace, e del bene trove asilo e conforto al principio della sua conversione.—1206.” A rounded arch, presumably representing the doorway to the Spadalonga house, frames the entrance to the simple chapel, along with an old bell and rope that offers an irresistible invitation to pull.

  For all the pride Gubbio takes in the legend of the Spadalongas’ charity, the city is more popularly known for another legend—Francis and the wolf. Indeed, the miracle of Francis and the wolf, presumably a different wolf from the one terrorizing farmers near the Abbazia di Vallingegno, almost defines Gubbio. There is a huge bronze sculpture of Francis with the wolf in the garden just outside the church and another near the Porta Romana gate into the city. The Rough Guide lists San Francesco e il Lupo (wolf) and the Taverna del Lupo as two of the city’s most popular restaurants. The saint and the wolf appear on souvenir ceramic tiles and mugs and wall hangings in shops all over Gubbio. Everyone loves the miracle of Francis and the wolf.

  The Gubbio legend began when a wolf, described on one of the sculptures as “un grandissimo lupo, terribile et feroce,” was terrorizing Gubbians by killing livestock and farmers alike. The good people were scared to go outside the city walls until Francis arrived on a visit—and decided to confront the wolf himself. The people begged him not to, but off he went toward the forest and soon encountered the grandissimo lupo slouching toward him, teeth bared. And the miracle begins.

  Francis stopped the wolf in midstride, according to Little Flowers of St. Francis, by making the sign of the cross. He then ordered “Brother Wolf” to come to him, which the wolf summarily did and meekly “lay down at the Saint’s feet as though it had become a lamb.” After scolding the wolf for committing “horrible crimes,” Francis proceeded to negotiate peace with the beast. Would he promise to stop his killing spree if the people of Gubbio promised to give him food every day? The wolf nodded his head, then placed his paw in Francis’s hand to cement the pledge. Francis and the wolf, now walking beside him “like a very gentle lamb,” returned to the marketplace, where a huge crowd had gathered.

  After delivering a sermon from a rock—now enshrined in the church of San Francesco—Francis exacted a promise from the people of Gubbio to “feed the wolf regularly.” They evidently did. “It went from door to door for food. It hurt no one and no one hurt it,” recounts the Little Flowers of St. Francis. The Gubbians were even sorry when the wolf died two years later and erected a shrine over its burial site on the Via Globo. In a startling validation of the legend, an excavation of the shrine in the late nineteenth century is said to have revealed the skeleton of a wolf, with its feroce teeth and skull intact.

  So powerful was the legend of the wolf among early Franciscans that in 1213 the bishop of Assisi persuaded the Benedictines to give Francis and his friars La Vittorina, a tiny church just outside the curren
t city walls, where the taming of the wolf took place. We have a rather difficult time finding the church in the confluence of roads looping around it, but we manage, guided by a modern bronze sculpture of a barefoot, tattered Francis being licked in the face by the adoring wolf. We clearly are not the only ones to have sought out the legendary shrine: Stuffed in Francis’s sculpted bronze hand is a bouquet of fresh red roses.

  I want to digress for a moment here to explain why I am including so many of Francis’s miracles and in such detail. Some of his modern biographers downplay or even exclude the many miracles attributed to him. They are more concerned with Francis’s spiritual development and the rapid growth of the Franciscan movement. That, of course, is understandable and entirely relevant, but I think diminishing the miracles misses an instructive and charming dimension of the Franciscan legend. Obviously, there’s no way to prove the miracles, which if taken literally often seem silly. One has to suspend disbelief and not only give in to the mysticism that laced medieval times but factor in a political aspect as well.

  Francis’s medieval biographers, all of whom were Franciscan friars, were determined to present him as a messenger of God on earth and thus armed him with all sorts of otherworldly powers. They were also determined to confirm and maintain his status as a saint, which gives even more credence to their emphasis on miracles. That they were successful goes without saying, but their body of evidence seems far less relevant and even embarrassing today to some modern Franciscan friars.

  “Yes, that supposedly happened here,” says Padre Tonino, a friar we meet at the Franciscan church in Alessandria, Lombardy. We have gone miles out of our way to the attractive, quite modern city because eight centuries ago Celano had recorded a charming miracle there, performed on Francis’s behalf, after a dinner party.