On the Road with Francis of Assisi (13 page)

Francis’s strategy at what was essentially a boot camp for friars was to instruct his brothers by his example, and by every account he succeeded. Like Francis, the early brothers threw themselves into thornbushes, went without shoes and food, worked as laborers for no pay, and cared for lepers. They deepened their spiritual life by fighting sleep to add prayer time, roping themselves erect, or wearing wooden girdles; they spoke only when necessary, walked with downcast eyes so they could cling to “heaven with their minds,” and lived, communally, in quiet thanksgiving. “These were the teachings of their beloved father, by which he formed his new sons, not by words alone and tongue, but above all in deeds and in truth,” writes Celano.

They also finished restoring another little church, San Pietro della Spina. Located vaguely by St. Bonaventure “a little farther from the city,” it has since been identified more accurately by Francis’s contemporary biographers as a chapel a mile or so from San Damiano. But we never find it.

The expensive, English-speaking guide we hire in Assisi takes us to quite a different San Pietro and insists it is this rather massive San Pietro that Francis restored. But perhaps it is just as well. San Pietro della Spina has evidently returned to the same derelict condition it was in when Francis and his friars started to repair it. Owned by a farming family, the little chapel is evidently used now as a storage barn for hay and farm equipment.

I leave the Sacred Hovel at Rivo Torto somewhat puzzled by the sculpted prone figure of a sleeping Francis in one of the cells when my mind’s eye has him sleeping sitting up, to look at the sanctuary’s stained glass windows. All are of scenes from Francis’s life—Francis touching a leper, Francis listening to the San Damiano cross, Francis receiving the stigmata, et cetera, but I do not see, though I may be mistaken, an event that took place at Rivo Torto and was reproduced by Giotto in the basilica in Assisi.

As recounted by St. Bonaventure, a “chariot of fire, of marvelous splendor” entered the hovel in the middle of the night and moved “hither and thither” three times, leaving the brothers “amazed” and “affrighted.” Some even saw Francis, who was away at the time, riding in the chariot toward heaven, mirroring the ascension made by the prophet Elijah, who had guided the Jews. When Francis returned to Rivo Torto the next day, he interpreted the friars’ vision as a friendly prediction from on high that the first few friars would grow “into a multitude.” Francis’s words both soothed and reassured the friars that “they would be most assuredly safe and blessed in following his life and teaching.”

It isn’t until we leave the church that I realize why I hadn’t seen that part of the legend in the stained glass windows: The episode is portrayed in a colorful mosaic on the façade—Elijah ascending toward the heavens in his chariot of fire. A second mosaic tells another famous Rivo Torto story: the passage nearby of the emperor Otto IV in 1209 to be crowned in Rome by Pope Innocent III.

The story is quintessential Francis. As Thomas of Celano tells it, the friars were living right “next to the very parade route” and must have wanted mightily to see Otto’s procession with all its “clamor and pomp,” but Francis wouldn’t let them. Nothing represented more the evil and material ways of the world that Francis and his friars had rejected than the emperor and his gaudy procession. Instead, Francis instructed his brothers to remain inside the Sacred Hovel and immerse themselves in their far better spiritual world of contemplation and prayer.

But Francis always had a knack for the dramatic. He excused one of his friars from his prayers and dispatched him to penetrate the procession, get as close to the emperor as possible, and continuously call out that “his glory would last but a short time.” The unfortunate friar presumably returned to Rivo Torto with at least a bloodied nose, but Francis had made his point. “The apostolic authority was strong in him,” Celano writes, “and he therefore refused entirely to offer flattery to kings and princes.”

The brothers’ idyll at Rivo Torto came to an abrupt end one day when a peasant burst through the door with his donkey and claimed the building for himself. Francis was evidently annoyed that the intruder had disturbed his companions’ silent prayer and quickly decided that rather than share the already inadequate space, it was time for the brothers to move on. “I know that God has not called me to entertain a donkey,” he said to them, as quoted in the
Legend of the Three Companions.
It was then that Francis and his first followers moved to the Porziuncola, where succeeding generations of friars remain to this day.

But Francis and his early companions were already well on their way in spreading the word about their particular vision of heaven on earth. From the beginning, when they numbered only four, they had set out to preach Francis’s message of peace, goodwill, and penance. Taking his cue from the Gospels, Francis sent them on their journeys, like Jesus’ disciples, two by two. And he went, too.

Francis would walk thousands of miles around Italy, through the hill towns and valleys of Umbria and Tuscany and over the Apennine Mountains to the Marches of Ancona. He would retreat to the solitude of mountaintop hermitages and to islands in Umbrian lakes and the Venice lagoon. He would try to take his message abroad, to France, to Spain, to Morocco, to Syria, and in 1219 he would finally succeed in taking it to Egypt. He walked barefoot in the heat and the cold, in the rain and in the snow, and when his health failed, he rode on a donkey.

He started from Rivo Torto in 1208 and walked for the next eighteen years. And we went with him, to some of the most beautiful places in Italy.

9

The First Tour to the Marches

T
HE
M
ARCHES,
the frontier province where Francis is declared mad · the
R
IETI
V
ALLEY,
where he battles his conscience at Poggio Bustone

M
y spirit falters as we head east across Umbria toward the province of the Marches to follow Francis and Brother Giles, his traveling companion, on their first preaching tour. Looming on the horizon is a high stretch of the Apennines, which we, like Francis and Giles, will have to cross to achieve our mutual destination. Unlike the gentle, mounded mountains of Umbria, this range of the Apennines rakes the sky and is the forbidding gateway to the province in central Italy that runs thirty miles east from the mountains to the Adriatic Sea. As the valley road we’re driving on passes through narrowing farmland and ever-encroaching, steeper mountainsides, I brace for ultimate hairpin turns and white-knuckle driving. I’m wrong.

We barely rise above sea level. The engineering miracle of Italian tunnels—twenty-three in all on this trip—makes our transition through the mountains from Umbria to the Marches as level as sitting on a living room couch. In between tunnels, the scenery is simply staggering. Gigantic pinnacles of rock. Sheer cliffs and chasms. Firs and pines rising seemingly on top of one another. And there, on a far ridge, a still-visible ancient rock “ditch” or
fossato
that Francis and Giles themselves might have crossed the mountains on.

Little is known about Francis’s first preaching foray to the Marches, in the spring of 1208. But it was a journey, however arduous, that he would make at least six other times. The people in the Marches eventually embraced Francis and his teachings warmly—by 1282, according to the
Little Flowers of St. Francis,
there would be eighty-five Franciscan friaries established in the Marches, double the number in Tuscany or Umbria. This first trip, however, was not a success.

While Francis was evidently ecstatic walking through the forests of poplar, oak, and beech, and loudly “singing out in French, praising and blessing the Lord,” the farmers and villagers he came across did not share his jubilation. A medieval biographer, the Anonymous of Perugia, recounts that the people declared the wild-looking, barefooted Francis and Giles as “mad,” “fools,” or “drunkards.” “Young women, seeing them at a distance, would run away,” the biographer writes.

Not only did the people distrust these self-proclaimed messengers of God but they rejected their message. There was little interest in religion of any kind at the time, among either pagans or the tepid, uninterested Christians. “Love and fear of God were non-existent almost everywhere and the way of penance was not only completely unknown, but it was also considered folly,” says the
Legend of the Three Companions.
“Lust for the flesh, greed for the world, and pride of life was so widespread, that the whole world seemed to be engulfed in these three malignancies.”

Undeterred, Francis and Giles developed a routine. Francis would urge whomever they came across to fear and love God and do penance for their sins, while Giles would nod and say: “Believe him.” But nobody did.

His other friars would fare no better on their first tentative forays, two by two through Umbria and toward the pilgrim path of St. James of Compostela in Spain. Before the friars set out, recounts the
Legend of the Three Companions,
Francis predicted that though they would find some “faithful people, meek and kind,” they would also find “many others, faithless, proud and blasphemous who will resist and reject you and what you say.” He was right.

People were suspicious of the friars when they followed Francis’s instructions to greet them by saying: “God give you peace.” Then there was the strange way the friars looked, with their bare feet and their threadbare habits. Were they charlatans and thieves? Were they savages? And why wouldn’t they accept money as alms, like regular beggars?

The friars were chased, sometimes beaten, splattered with mud, even stripped naked. But they evidently clung to Francis’s admonition to “to bear these things with patience and humility.” The friars never fought back or deviated from Francis’s message. “God give you peace,” they said, over and over, then exhorted the curious and often hostile crowds to repent and shun evil before it was too late. “Who are you?” the suspicious people asked them time and again. The friars always gave Francis’s answer: “We are penitents from Assisi.”

Francis and Giles, the “penitents from Assisi” in the Marches, are thought to have gone to Fabriano, an established center in their time and now a sprawling industrialized city at the end of the twenty-third tunnel. Medieval Fabriano was known, and still is, as the papermaking capital of Italy. Not only did the city’s master papermakers invent the watermark but they produced the singular high-quality paper that is still used for banknotes all over the world. Contemporary artists, too, seek out Fabriano paper, as did the incomparable Leonardo da Vinci in the fifteenth century and the city’s famous native son, Gentile da Fabriano, in the fourteenth.

We find modern Fabriano to be a rather cheerless city, but then again, when we arrive there it is midday, when everything in Italy seems to shut down, and it is also raining. We achieve Fabriano’s cavernous and curiously empty medieval piazza and park the car to review the notes from our Italian-language book
I viaggi di S. Francesco d’Assisi nelle Marche—
The Journeys of S. Francesco of Assisi in the Marches—which English-speaking Italians along the way have generously translated for us.

Francis and Giles probably performed their routine in the piazza we’re parked in, but there is no record of it. Who knew then that the ragged little madman from Assisi would soon become one of the most recognized figures in Italy? What is recorded in the book is the trip Francis made to Fabriano just two years later, in 1210, when he was better known. He stayed in a sanctuary called the Eremo di S. Maria di Valdisasso, a former Benedictine convent for nuns just four and a half miles from Fabriano, near the village of Valleremita, and we set off to find it.

In one of the minor miracles that begin to govern our pursuit of Francis, we chance upon a young woman standing under an arcade in the lonely piazza who knows exactly how to get to Valleremita and the convent of Valdisasso. We happen to be parked in exactly the right spot, she says. Take a right at the next stoplight and drive for 5.5 kilometers. We do, following the edge of a narrow, densely forested gorge to the little, lopsided village of Valleremita tucked into the end of the valley. Turn right up the hill in the center of town. We do, though our anxiety begins to mount as the road turns to red dirt and we don’t seem to be getting anywhere.

Francis was evidently just as anxious about finding the convent. Our Italian book tells the story of him asking a farmer he chanced upon to accompany him to Valdisasso. The farmer, who was in the middle of plowing his field, was reluctant, but Francis somehow talked him into it. When the farmer returned from delivering Francis to the convent, he found that his field had been completely plowed, and further, his oxen were entirely rested.

That field is still known locally as the “field of San Francesco,” and we undoubtedly pass it before, miraculously, we too arrive at the charming Franciscan sanctuary of Valdisasso. It was here, in the beautifully restored medieval stone convent, that Francis stayed for the first, but certainly not last, time with four of his friars. The Franciscans would base themselves at Valdisasso off and on for the next six hundred years, lending it the nickname Porziuncola of the Marches.

The gate is locked, but there is room to walk around it to a manicured lawn terrace. An arched cloister with traces of frescoes on its walls and ceiling flanks one side of the lawn, the actual sanctuary, a second. There is a well-tended vegetable garden and flowers everywhere, in the window boxes of the sanctuary and in hanging baskets under the arches. Valdisasso is obviously inhabited, but by whom? We pull a cord to ring the sanctuary bell, but no one comes.

We don’t feel we’re trespassing. There are several picnic tables in a glade just off the lawn, trails cut through the woods, and a very full garbage bin, which signal its public recreational use. That, plus a sign in Italian saying to please eat at the tables, not to litter, and to observe
silenzio,
makes us feel welcome as we look out over the gorge at miles and miles of forested mountains.

We let ourselves into the sanctuary’s tiny, restored twelfth-century church, which is billed in one Italian translation on the Internet as having the “beautifulest ceiling.” The arched ceiling is indeed a marvel, but then so is the altarpiece, a copy of the coronation of the Virgin (the original was moved to Milan) attended by the various medieval saints who stayed at Valdisasso, including San Bernardino from Siena, San Giovanni of Capistrano, San Giacomo from Marca, and of course, San Francesco. All this unexpected beauty at the end of a dirt road in the seeming heart of nowhere.

Francis and Giles returned to the Porziuncola after their first visit to the Marches, trekking fifteen miles a day. In keeping with Jesus’ command to his disciples—and Francis’s to his—they took nothing with them on their journey and bartered their labor on farms and in villages along the way for food and lodging. From the beginning, Francis insisted that his friars work every day, preferably with their hands, or “with a trade they have learned,” provided that it was in keeping with goodness and honesty. “Idleness,” he wrote to his friars, quoting from the sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict, “is the enemy of the soul.”

The early Franciscans’ work requirement would stand them in good stead. As strange as they looked, their free toil shoulder to shoulder with everyone else in the vineyards and hay fields and their gratitude in return for a crust of bread and a night’s sleep in a farm shed began to win them credibility. So did their work with the poor and the lepers. They lived what they preached—and with joy. “Let them be careful not to appear outwardly as sad and gloomy hypocrites but show themselves joyful, cheerful and consistently gracious in the Lord,” Francis directed his friars in an early, written rule. Modern Franciscans still take that rule to heart. Every friar we meet on our many journeys through Italy is positively merry.

Soon after Francis returned to the Porziuncola, he set off again, this time with six of his friars. This second, and far more successful, preaching tour was to the Rieti Valley, a beautiful inland region of central Italy, halfway between Assisi and Rome, laced with forests and lakes and hills. Perhaps it was the valley’s natural wonders and agreeable climate that tempered the suspicions of its residents and made them more accepting of the early Franciscans.

Unlike the people in the Marches, those in the Rieti Valley evidently listened to the penitents’ sermons and converted in high numbers. The people in the hill town of Poggio Bustone, where we are headed, were particularly enthusiastic about Francis and his message. Maybe that is why he added a new and still locally celebrated greeting—
“buon giorno, buona gente”
—a lively, rhythmic phrase in Italian that translates quite dully into English as “good day, good people.” So revolutionary was the greeting at the time, the people presumably never having been called “good,” that the Italian phrase is engraved on a wall in Poggio Bustone and is commemorated every year on the fourth of October, when the town crier races from house to house at dawn, calling out,
“Buon giorno, buona gente.”

Given the friars’ more harsh experiences elsewhere, it is not surprising that Francis would spend a great deal of time over the years—some say even more time than he spent in and around Assisi—in the hospitable Rieti Valley. He would establish at least five hermitages there, four of which exist to this day, in what has become known as the Sacred Valley of Rieti.

Yet for all the success of his first preaching tour to the Rieti Valley, this was not a happy time for Francis. He was reportedly beset with confusion and feelings of unworthiness when he first arrived at Poggio Bustone in 1208 and went on to a Benedictine friary by the same name high above the town. What should he be instructing his little band of brothers? What was their mission? What was his mission? Most important, how could he preach the embrace of poverty and selflessness when he himself had lived such a sinful, hedonistic life? What business did he have urging people to love and nurse the lepers when he had spent years running away from them? Would God forgive him? Could he forgive himself?

We, by contrast, are worried only about oxygen deprivation as we pass the town and start navigating the hairpin turns and switchbacks on the steep mountain road toward the old friary. Up and up we go, following the familiar gold cross sanctuary road signs through high olive groves and forests of ilex, pine, and oaks, until finally, around a last curve, we achieve the medieval stone church and friary of Poggio Bustone—only to discover the small parking lot is full. The white-paper ribbons festooning the cars signal a wedding is under way.

Being seasoned Francis hands by now, we do not find it surprising in the least to encounter a wedding going on at the top of the world. Everyone in Italy, it seems, wants to be married, baptized, or eulogized in a church associated with St. Francis. And Poggio Bustone
is
Francis.

I know from his biographers that Francis, not content with being at the already dizzying heights of the friary, climbed another thousand feet, to what is known as the Grotto of Revelations or the Upper Shrine, to beg for God’s forgiveness. We set out on foot along the road next to the church, following signs to the Sacro Speco.

Our paperback guide to the hermitages in the Rieti Valley describes the route to the Upper Shrine as a “steep pathway.” That is no exaggeration. For close to thirty minutes we labor straight up the cobbled mountain path, pausing only to pant and admire the wild, dwarf red cyclamen blooming in the woods.