On the Road with Francis of Assisi

by Linda Bird Francke

  And so, in late June 1225, Francis said a final farewell to Clare and set out for Rieti. It was the last time the two saints of Assisi would see each other.

  23

  Agony in the Rieti Valley

  RIETI, where Francis’s medical treatment fails · FONTE COLOMBO, the hermitage where hot pokers do not cure his eyes · LA FORESTA, the hermitage where piercing his ears fails as well

  Francis was mobbed by the people of Rieti when he arrived in July at the walled city in central Italy. Many people, including members of the Papal court ensconced there, already considered him a saint, and they pushed and shoved to get near him, pluck at his habit, and kiss the tips of his fingers protruding from his protective sleeves. It could not have been an easy time for the ailing Francis.

  Our hotel, the Quattro Stagioni, miraculously turns out to be just down the piazza from Rieti’s massive thirteenth-century cathedral and the adjoining Bishop’s Palace, where Francis stayed along with the Papal court. The old stone building is testament to the turmoil of the times: One Pope after another had to flee to Rieti to escape the violent uprisings in Rome. Pope Boniface VIII, who would escape to Rieti in 1298, added the Arco del Vescovo (Bishop’s Arch) to the thirteenth-century palace as extra insurance; the still-existing arched bridge known locally as the Arch of Boniface allowed him to flee across the street from one part of the building to another should predators be at his heels.

  Francis was besieged not by predators but by supplicants during his stay at the Bishop’s Palace. One, a cleric named Gideon, begged the holy man to relieve his back pain so intense that he “could no longer stand upright.” Though the cleric was a well-known philanderer who lived “according to the desires of the flesh,” Francis took pity on his suffering and struck a deal: He would bless Gideon and leave it up to the Lord to cure him or not, for which, in return, the cleric would never return to his sinful ways. Gideon agreed, of course, and Francis made the sign of the cross over him—with instant results. “He immediately stood up and got up, completely healed,” recounts the Assisi Compilation. “When he stood up, you could hear the bones in his back cracking like dry wood in your hands.”

  But the cleric did not heed Francis’s warning that he would “incur a very harsh judgment” if he returned to his “vomit.” Gideon succumbed again to the lure of the flesh a few years later and died shortly thereafter while spending the night in the home of a fellow canon. The roof of the house inexplicably collapsed in the middle of the night, sparing the lives of all the occupants save “only that wretch who was trapped and killed.”

  One of the Papal physicians treating Francis also looked to him for a miracle. To the eye doctor’s great dismay, a large crack suddenly opened in the wall of his new house, threatening the structure with collapse. In desperation, according to St. Bonaventure, the doctor asked Francis’s companions to give him something the “man of God had touched” to try to stave off the disaster. The something turned out be a bit of Francis’s hair, which the doctor placed in the crack before he went to bed. And voilà. “When he rose in the morning, he found that the crack had been so firmly closed that he could not pull out the hairs he had placed there nor could he find any trace of the crack.”

  The miracle of the doctor’s house has seemingly kept on giving. The Palazzo Piccadori now stands on the exact site of the medieval doctor’s house, at the intersection of the Via dei Crispoliti and the Via Garibaldi. According to Stefano, a young architect we chance upon in the palazzo’s courtyard, it is one of only two structures in Rieti to have escaped any damage from the major earthquakes of 1800 and 1997.

  Francis was the recipient of various miracles himself during his treatment in Rieti. For all the close care Leo was taking of him, the seeping wound in his side evidently saturated its dressing and so fouled his tunic that he asked one of his friars to try to find him material for a new one. The friar was on his way out of the Bishop’s Palace to beg for cloth the next morning when he was stopped by a man sitting on the doorstep. “For the love of the Lord, brother, please accept this cloth enough for six tunics,” the man said. “Keep one for yourself and distribute the rest as you please for the good of my soul.” So Francis, and some lucky other friars, got miraculous new tunics.

  Curiously, there is nothing in the medieval biographies about the medical treatment Francis received in Rieti. We do know that one of the Pope’s doctors was an Arab named Tebaldo Saraceni, whose house Francis evidently stayed in for a while during his attempt at a cure. The house, now privately owned and identified by a stone cross on the outside wall, is on the Via San Rufo. Its stark exterior gives no indication, however, of the charming miracle that occurred within.

  Francis loved music but, according to the Assisi Compilation, was harshly critical of those who played instruments “for the sake of vanity and sin” rather than “by holy people to praise God.” During his agony, however, he bent his own rule and decided to try to “change that pain of my body to joy and consolation of spirit” by having one of his companions, a former musician, secretly play the lute (some say a zither) for him. But the friar resisted. If the people of Rieti heard him play, he protested, they would think he had reverted to his former, unholy ways. Francis immediately rescinded his request. “Then, brother, let’s let it go,” he said.

  But a higher spirit had evidently heard his entreaty. The next night, around midnight, Francis heard the “sound of a lute playing a melody more beautiful and delightful than he had ever heard in his life.” The music came from here, from there, from far away and near, for over an hour. In the morning, an “overjoyed” and “exulted” Francis deemed the music to have been played by an angel. His friars agreed it was a great miracle, confirmed by the fact that the city had a midnight curfew and no one would have dared leave home at that time.

  However ill Francis felt in Rieti, his charity and generosity were not diminished. When his eye doctor told him about a destitute woman he was treating for free, Francis determined to give her his mantle. But how? Elias, the order’s minister general and the friar appointed as his brother guardian, had ordered Francis not to give any of his clothing away without their permission. So Francis devised a clever ruse, recorded in the Assisi Compilation, to secure permission to give the woman his mantle.

  “Brother Guardian, we have to give back what belongs to someone else,” he said to him. “And what is that, brother?” the guardian asked. “That mantle,” Francis replied, “which we received as a loan from that poor woman with eye trouble.” When it was posed that way, what could the guardian do but agree, and the mantle, plus a dozen loaves of bread, was quickly dispatched to the woman. She was evidently so startled by her good fortune and fearful of it being taken away that she left Rieti with her bounty in the middle of the night to return to her home.

  It is rainy and cold during our last visit to Rieti in February 2004, and as we did during the stolen moments the weather afforded us at the Caffè Meletti in Ascoli, we take time to eat. Dinner is especially memorable at the Palazzo Sinizi. There is no menu. The four-course meal simply unfolds, starting with a delicious antipasto of local sausages, prosciutto, various beans, baked tomatoes, and eggplant. A choice of pasta—red or white—follows. We choose the white, a cream sauce laced with rabbit and juniper berries, and move on to the next choice: filet mignon, pork, wild boar, lamb, or sausage, which is butchered to order and grilled right in front of us in a blazing fire.

  We are mesmerized watching the chefs rub the meat with lemon, then expertly grill the meat, accompanied by large, flung handfuls of coarse salt. The thought of dessert leaves us limp, but on it comes, a fluffy, light cream “Mimosa” cake, a specialty of the restaurant. All of this washed down by a delicious local red wine, Colli della Sabina.

  We walk it off on a leg of Rieti’s recently completed eighty-mile-long walking, biking, and/or horse trail called the Cammino di Francesco, the “walk of Francis.” The trail links Rieti with all the Franciscan hermitages in the Rieti Valley: Poggio Buston
e, Greccio, Fonte Colombo, and La Foresta, which will soon figure in Francis’s medical treatment. The cammino winds through forests and up the sides of mountains with a spur to a treasured relic—some of Francis’s remains in the National Votive Temple on Mount Terminillo—and another to the Faggio di San Francesco, a miraculous and tortured beech tree near Poggio Bustone that bowed its branches during a storm to shelter Francis. (The latter, which we find just below a sun-drenched pasture on a hill close to heaven, should not be missed.)

  Perhaps Francis followed the cammino himself when he left Rieti in the late summer of 1225 and went, once again, to the hermitage of Fonte Colombo. For all the good intentions of the Papal physicians, they had not managed to cure his eye disease or alleviate its painful symptoms. But the doctors were not through trying. Francis, by horseback, and we, by car, head back to the nearby sanctuary where he would undergo an experimental and brutal new treatment—the cauterization of his temples with a red-hot poker.

  The old stone friary at Fonte Colombo sits diagonally across from the oak tree under which Francis received the Rule of 1223 and directly across from the tiny Chapel of the Magdalene. Though the day is warm, I shiver when we enter the friary’s stone anteroom with its now dormant fireplace, where the procedure would take place. The “operation” has been written about so vividly by all of Francis’s medieval biographers that it is painfully easy to imagine.

  Here is Francis, his eyes so light-sensitive that his friars have sewed a linen band to his hood to cover them. Around him are a few of his friars, worried and exhausted by their worry. They are waiting for Brother Elias, the head of the order, to arrive and order Francis to have the procedure. “The saint hesitated to let himself be treated,” says the Legend of Perugia. “He found it bitterly repugnant to be so concerned about himself; that is why he wanted the decision to come from his minister.”

  But the minister does not come. Francis becomes increasingly concerned about the time and attention his friars are paying to his infirmity and promises them that the Lord “will credit you with the good works that you have to neglect in order to take care of me.” It seems doubtful that the friars, seeing Francis in such poor health, feel reassured.

  While Francis waits for Elias to arrive, he dictates several letters, probably to Leo. Some of the letters are to Clare, though they have never been found. Others, which have survived, indicate that Francis knew he was nearing the end of his days. One, in which he mentions his “sickness,” is addressed to the “Entire Order” and firmly instructs his friars to observe the discipline of the Rule or risk being seen by him as neither “Catholics nor my brothers.”

  Another, addressed to the “Rulers of the Peoples,” exhorts “all the mayors and counsels, magistrates and rulers throughout the world” to remember that the “day of death is coming” and not to turn away from the Lord but to embrace him. Francis also suggests that the authorities send a town crier through their respective streets every evening to announce to all the people that “praise and thanks may be given to the all-powerful Lord God,” a clear reference to the Islamic call to prayer five times a day, which Francis had heard—and admired—in Egypt.

  But Elias still does not come to Fonte Colombo. The most frequent visitor is the Arab doctor who becomes the catalyst for yet another miracle recorded in the Legend of Perugia. Just as he is leaving one day, Francis suddenly directs the friars to invite the doctor to join them for a “good meal.” The ashamed friars “blushingly admit” there is very little to eat, but Francis insists. “O men of little faith, do not make me repeat myself,” he says.

  So the rich doctor, who says he is honored to eat with the poor brothers, sits down with them to share a crust or two of bread and a few vegetables when there is an unexpected knock on the door and in comes a woman with a basket full of “white bread, fish, lobster-pie, some honey and some grapes that seemed to have been freshly picked.” To the doctor and the friars, the timing of the miracle meal, which has been sent to Fonte Colombo by “the lady of a castle about seven miles away,” is yet another irrefutable example of Francis’s sanctity.

  A visit from another doctor does not end so happily. Elias evidently never arrives, but the obedient Francis finally bows to the insistence of Cardinal Ugolino and consents to the cauterization. The friars build up the fire. The doctor takes out his “cautery” and heats the metal until it is crimson. The friars feel faint with dread, but Francis, facing the reality of what he is about to endure, speaks directly to the flames.

  “Brother Fire,” he says, “the Lord created you as something noble and useful among all creatures. Be courteous to me in this hour.” As Francis makes the sign of the cross over the fire and the doctor advances with the crimson steel, the friars flee.

  The doctor lays the hissing steel on Francis’s temple, burning the flesh from the ear to the eyebrow. He then reheats the steel and repeats the searing on the other side. Francis does not cry out or give any indication of what must have been excruciating. Instead he chastises his brothers when they cautiously reenter the room, calling them “cowards,” and “men of little faith” because they did not believe he would feel no pain.

  Francis presumably recuperated in one of the two tiny cells just off the anteroom, the door openings so low that even I, at five foot two, have to stoop to enter. I need some time to recuperate myself, having imagined perhaps too vividly the medieval and useless torture Francis must have suffered in that cold, stone anteroom. Whether or not he felt his pain, I did. And the doctors were still not through with him.

  The small hermitage of La Foresta, known then as San Fabiano, is also in the Rieti Valley, some five miles from Fonte Colombo. Francis’s friars brought him to this charming sanctuary, nestled in a sun-drenched clearing in a forest of chestnuts and oaks, in the fall of 1225. Somewhere at La Foresta, either in the still-smoke-blackened interior of the stone domus, or guesthouse, or in the nearby Grotta di San Francesco, the rock fissure to which Francis moved to spare his eyes from the smoke, the doctors tried another and equally futile procedure: They heated a poker once again—and pierced both his ears.

  La Foresta is such a cheerful place now that it is more difficult to imagine Francis’s suffering here. Like those of several other Franciscan hermitages we’ve visited, La Foresta’s immaculate gardens and vineyards are tended by a Mondo X community. There is no television allowed, no newspapers, no distractions from the outside world. It is very Franciscan. “Our life here is based on manual work and dialogue, so that those suffering from alcoholism, drug addiction, depression, the Mafia, existential crisis, can develop a better inner life,” says Daniele, the community’s leader, whom we meet arranging carnations and daisies in the medieval church of San Fabian.

  La Foresta’s vineyards played a central role in Francis’s protracted stay here, some say for twenty days, others, fifty. La Foresta is only three miles from Rieti, and Francis’s arrival at the hermitage caused an enormous stir. The cardinals and clerics from the refugee Papal court in Rieti visited him daily. The people of Rieti and its neighboring villages also flocked to see the living saint, with the obvious consequences. Because the guesthouse had only one door and because the sole approach to the door was through the vineyard, many of the priest’s grapevines were either ravaged or trampled.

  The priest, naturally, was upset. According to the Legend of Perugia, he complained to anyone who would listen that the vintage he was counting on for his year’s needs was lost. When Francis was informed of the priest’s distress, he summoned him. “How many loads of wine does your vineyard produce every year?” Francis asked him. “Thirteen,” the priest answered. “Have confidence in the Lord, and in my words,” Francis counseled him. “If you harvest less than twenty loads, I promise to make up the difference.” There was no need, of course. The priest harvested a bumper crop of twenty loads from his ragged vines, which was considered by all “a great miracle due to the merits of blessed Francis.”

  The remains of the old stone winepress w
ith the original rock in it are still in the priest’s guesthouse. The stone slab altar in the charming church of San Fabian is the original one used by the poor priest, and the church’s original stone floor is clearly visible through glass panels in the newish floor. It takes little imagination to see Francis here, under the church’s primitive peaked wooden roof with red tau crosses painted in every panel, or in the Grotta di San Francesco, the cave little bigger than a narrow crevice in a rock.

  Some historians, especially those in Rieti, believe that Francis wrote the famous Canticle of Brother Sun, or at least some of the verses, in this stone crevice. He had the time, they point out. He was surrounded by the very elements of nature he extols in the canticle—Brother Sun, Sister Moon and Stars, Brothers Wind and Air, Mother Earth. And it is possible that they are right.

  What remains indisputable is that Francis’s health did not improve. Wasted by tuberculosis, recurring malaria, liver disease, his eye infection, and possibly leprosy, he barely survived the winter of 1225 in the various hermitages in the Rieti Valley. But the doctors still had not finished with him.

  In April 1226, just as the sun was warming the winter earth, the ever-obedient Francis acquiesced to the orders of Cardinal Ugolino and Brother Elias to be treated by yet more doctors. His loyal friars took him, on horseback, to Siena. Francis would never return to his beloved Rieti Valley.

  24

  Hearing the Larks Sing

  SIENA, where Francis vomits blood · the CELLE DI CORTONA, where his body bloats · BAGNARA, where he can breathe the cool air · THE PORZIUNCOLA, where Francis dies

  The medieval sanctuary of Alberino, where Francis spent two months during the last and futile attempt at a medical cure, sits on a hill a few blocks outside the walls of Siena.