On the Road with Francis of Assisi (5 page)

Ironically, it was Francis’s pretension that saved his life. The Perugians spared the nobles and took them prisoner for the ransom they would fetch. Francis, mistakenly identified as a noble by the clothes he wore, his manners, and especially the fact he had a horse, was spared as well. That meant money in the bank to the Perugians and a year of hell for Francis.

We follow him from the industrial town of Ponte San Giovanni to Perugia, where he would spend the next twelve months or so in a dungeon somewhere under the town, without light, without sanitation, without adequate food or clean water, without a change of clothes in the cold of winter and the heat of summer.

He almost died.

2

Lost in Perugia

T
HE HILLTOP CITY
where Francis is imprisoned ·
A
SSISI,
where he returns, very ill, and goes back to his frivolous ways

P
erugia sprawls across Umbria’s high hills, a red-roofed city with a modern population of 150,000, more than six times the current population of the commune of Assisi. Whatever possessed the sons of Assisi to think they could defeat this muscular stronghold, assuming the skewed population ratio was roughly the same in their time, is beyond me. Even now Perugia is quite forbidding in its inaccessibility, and getting there is not half the fun for us—or certainly for Francis. He was undoubtedly marched up the hills and paraded through the cobbled streets with the other captured Assisians, jeered at and stoned by Perugia’s citizens. We escape any such humiliation, but after maneuvering all the hairpin turns up the hillside, we can’t find a place to park.

It is the afternoon rush hour; the first parking lot we come to, just inside the city walls, is full, and the Italians’ natural penchant for driving uncomfortably fast strains our resolve to press on. Instead of reentering the narrow speedway to look for another lot, we take the path of least resistance and follow a convoy of local cars into the hill town itself. Our high-fives of self-congratulation when we find a parking place on the street turn into a grueling forced march, up and down the steep streets, then up and around and down and up again until we achieve the city’s historic, and at first unwelcoming, medieval center.

Virtually all the Italians we encounter in our geographic search for St. Francis are extremely helpful, giving us advice and driving directions, a few even leading us to tricky destinations in their own cars. In one extraordinary gesture, the young owners of the upscale pasta takeout in the tiny village near our rented villa invite us to their home for a five-course dinner and to listen to their recording of
Francesco,
a musical about Francis that they have seen four times in Assisi.

An exception is the woman behind the commune desk in Perugia at the massive medieval Palazzo dei Priori, Perugia’s equivalent of a city hall. We are trying to locate the dungeon Francis was locked in, if it still exists. We fail. “I don’t know where it was,” the woman says with a shrug. “Perhaps it was right under this building.” When I ask her if she could refer me to anyone with more knowledge of Francis and medieval Perugia, she shakes her head. “There is nothing about St. Francis in Perugia,” she says. “Go to Assisi.” “What about the church of San Francesco al Prato?” I persist, pointing to the thirteenth-century church marked on the map she’d given me. “It’s closed,” she says.

We have better luck on a return trip to Perugia with a professional local guide named Inger. The dismissive woman in the commune office had been right about the closing of the church of San Francesco. The church had suffered water damage, Inger tells us, and is being renovated for use as a concert hall. I imagine that would please the young Francis, the troubadour, though in later life he would decry any music that did not contribute to the worship of God.

As to the medieval dungeon where Francis spent such a miserable year, Inger knows just where it is. We set out at a brisk pace across the windy, high plateau Perugia sits on and along the Piazza Matteotti to the very edge of a sheer cliff into which a five-story building has been built. Inger points at the bottom floor, and resisting an attack of vertigo, I lean over to look straight down at the site where, according to Inger, Francis was imprisoned.

How bleak it must have been, if Inger is correct—close to being buried alive. I imagine the dampness, the darkness, the airlessness. There is some thought that the prisoners were chained to the walls in the dungeons that were subsequently used to store salt. I am relieved when we turn away from our vantage point and my overwrought imagination begins to fade.

Perugia, understandably, would never be a favorite venue of Francis, though he would return here often to preach. Several of his miracles were centered in and around Perugia—a mute restored to speech, a cripple restored to physical health. But he persisted in calling it Babylon, and with good reason. The belligerent city not only regularly attacked and pillaged its neighbors but was a den of internal intrigue. Medieval Perugia was known for its deadly poisons, its murders and mutilations, its ritual war of stones, in which teams of men heaved rocks at each other until enough were dead or wounded to signal the game was over.

Such savagery is hard to imagine as we leave Inger and stroll around Perugia’s beautiful main square, the Piazza IV Novembre, watching its ocher palazzos turn burnt orange in the late afternoon sun. Instead of preparing to slaughter each other, the Perugians we see are preparing for their annual, weeklong Eurochocolate festival, which draws chocolate lovers from all over the world and showcases the city’s own Perugina chocolates.

The people in the cobbled streets seem very friendly toward each other, unlike their warring medieval predecessors. At one sorry point, recorded in Franciscan annals as the “Curse of Perugia,” the animosity within the city grew so venomous that it interrupted Francis’s sleep, fifteen miles away in Assisi. A vision of the pending carnage of an all-out civil war between knights and citizens, nobles and peasants came to Francis in a dream and led him quickly to Perugia to preach peace. It was not a welcome message.

I could imagine Francis standing on the steps of Perugia’s duomo, which also fronts on the Piazza IV Novembre, being heckled by the bloodthirsty knights who, Celano writes, “interfered with his words.” The slight friar in the tattered brown habit held his ground against the knights, warning them time and again not to “attack your neighbors with arms, kill and plunder them.” The knights evidently did not heed his warning that “wrath will teach you, for kindness has not,” because shortly thereafter, Perugia descended into civil strife with “unrestrained fury and slaughter,” just as Francis had envisioned.

But then again, little was sacred to medieval Perugians, including the Pope. One particularly gruesome incident would occur in July 1216, when Pope Innocent III died suddenly of an embolism in Perugia while on a countrywide tour raising recruits for the Fifth Crusade. Pending the funeral rites, his body was locked for safekeeping in the cathedral, where it quickly began to rot in the heat. Upon hearing of the Pope’s death, Francis hurried to Perugia, to discover not only that the body was decaying but that thieves had broken in and stripped the body of all its clothes and Papal trappings.

My husband and I enter the duomo with some trepidation—two other Popes, one of whom was poisoned to death, are buried there—but its vast, Baroque space seems benign. Mass is being said in a side chapel, and we linger, listening to the music of the liturgy. The cathedral has been rebuilt since the time of Francis, so there is no physical remnant of him there, but there is a great deal of Franciscan history.

Soon after Pope Innocent III died—and rotted—there, Francis was propelled by another dream to return to the duomo to meet with the new Pope, Honorius III. In this dream, which Francis had at the Porziuncola, his tiny chapel near Assisi, Jesus instructed him to ask the new Pope for a favor that would please God and bring salvation for humankind. Honorius was startled and his college of cardinals highly resistant when Francis asked the extraordinary favor: the Papal pardon of sin and remission of punishment to every single person who came to confess at the Porziuncola. Such a Papal indulgence was the carrot the Church offered to those who went off on the Crusades to slay the heathens, and its persuasive value would be severely diminished if redemption were available locally. But Francis persisted and the Pope finally relented, albeit with a restriction. Instead of the indulgence being granted to penitents every day, as Francis asked, it would be limited to one day a year, August 2. Francis returned home in ecstasy, saying, “I shall send them all to Paradise.” Who knows whether he succeeded, but the Porziuncola Indulgence started bringing thousands of penitents to Assisi on August 2; one chronicle in 1582 numbered them at over one hundred thousand.

We leave Perugia for the comfortable villa we have rented just north of of the town, so different from the dungeon where Francis spent that miserable year while his father negotiated for his release. Yet Francis’s biographers claim he remained cheerful throughout his incarceration, to the point where, Celano writes, “His grieving companions resented his happiness and considered him insane and mad.” Francis’s answer to their derision was to ascribe his joy to his conviction that someday he would be “venerated as a saint throughout the whole world,” a boastful prophecy that surely only confirmed their opinion that he was “insane and mad.” And perhaps he was.

The Francis who returned to Assisi at the age of twenty-two was not the naïve young man who had ridden gaily to war the year before. He was sick, very sick, most certainly with malaria and some say bone tuberculosis. He was more or less bedridden for a year, suffering debilitating fevers. When he finally began to get around with the help of a cane, he was a changed man. He would remain frail for the rest of his life and need constant care.

His ordeal in Perugia had diminished everything about Francis, including his sense of joy. During his recovery, Celano writes, “he went outside one day and began to look about at the surrounding landscape with great interest. But the beauty of the fields, the pleasantness of the vineyards, and whatever else was beautiful to look upon, could stir in him no delight. He wondered therefore at the sudden change that had come over him, and those who took delight in such things he considered very foolish.”

Celano’s sentiment about Francis’s joylessness rings true, but his last clause smacks of revisionist biography, for Francis himself continued to be foolish. He did not know how else to live. When Assisi’s displaced nobles began to return from Perugia in 1205, the price of Assisi’s defeat being the commune’s capitulation to the nobles’ demands for compensation, Francis went back to singing and carousing and indulging his friends.

He did become more charitable, however. In a scene commemorated by Giotto in Assisi, Celano writes that, at some point after Francis was “freed from his chains” in Perugia, he encountered an unfortunate knight in the road “who was poor and well nigh naked.” Francis, who had always idolized knights, “was moved by pity” and gave the knight the “costly garments he was wearing.” Francis made the gesture “for Christ’s sake,” according to Celano, which may very well be true, but then again, Francis may have been identifying with the knight because of the good fortune that had suddenly come his way.

An unknown noble from Assisi, possibly one of his fellow prisoners from Perugia, invited Francis to ride with him to Apulia in southern Italy to join Pope Innocent III’s forces against the imperial troops backed by the princes of Germany. The issue at hand was really a custody fight over guardianship of young Frederick II, son and heir of the late Emperor Henry VI, whose widow had entrusted the child’s education to the Pope instead of to the imperial court. The bloody struggle between Church and State over Frederick had been going on for almost seven years by the time Francis learned of the nobles’ impending mission. “Upon hearing this,” writes Celano, “Francis, who was flighty and not a little rash, arranged to go with him.”

It would be a very expensive endeavor. To be a knight required a full suit of custom armor, a chain-link protective blanket and trappings for his horse, a well-turned-out squire to ride with him. Then there were the weapons—a lance, a sculpted sword, assorted daggers—and an out-of-armor wardrobe that would be suitable for a man of noble status. It is thought that Pietro Bernadone had to sell several of his properties to outfit his son properly, but it must have seemed worth it for the higher social standing that having a knight in the family would bring the Bernadones.

The twenty-four-year-old Francis must have been ecstatic in the winter of 1205 as armorers all over Assisi hammered out his battle dress. Glory and honor were within his reach. He even had a reassuring dream about his future as a Papal warrior, which “raised his spirits with a vision of the heights of glory,” Celano writes. In the dream, his father’s house was filled with “the trappings of war, namely saddles, shields, lances and other things,” rather than the more customary “piles of cloth to be sold.” All these arms would “belong to him and his soldiers,” a voice told Francis in the dream. The interpretation seemed as simple then as it does now. “When he awoke, he arose in the morning with a glad heart, and considering the vision an omen of great success, he felt sure that his journey to Apulia would come out well.”

It did not.

3

The Missing Letter in Spoleto

T
HE GOLDEN CITY
where Francis gives up becoming a knight ·
M
ONTELUCO,
the hermitage he founds near Spoleto just because it is so beautiful · the
C
ARCERI,
the cave near Assisi where he prays for guidance

S
poleto rises out of the Umbrian hills like a golden beacon, its bell towers and churches gleaming against the blue sky. Twenty-four miles south of Assisi and a day’s ride by horse, Spoleto is known today for its classical music summer festival and the frescoes of the fifteenth-century artist Fra Lippo Lippi in the apse of the cathedral. In 1205, according to Francis’s biographers, it was the town where he had to abandon his quest for knighthood.

It was spring when Francis and his traveling companion set out from Assisi on what might very well have been a hot day. His new armor must have felt heavier and heavier as they rode along, as must his shield. It is not known whether they stopped to rest at one of the towns along the way or rode straight through to Spoleto, where they were to spend the night. In any event, by the time they reached Spoleto that night, Francis was sick again with a high fever.

In his delirium, he had a dream that began to change his life course. A voice spoke to him, according to Celano, asking him who could do better for him, the servant or the Lord. “The Lord,” Francis replied. Then why, the voice continued, was he looking for the servant instead of the Lord? “Lord, what do you want me to do?” Francis asked. “Go back to the place of your birth for through me your vision will have spiritual fulfillment,” the voice said.

Many biographers have wondered about the “voice” in that dream. Some think it must, of course, have been the voice of God preparing Francis for his more honorable role to come. Others think the voice might have been that of Francis himself, half delirious, realizing he could not continue his journey. Still others wonder if the “voice” Francis heard was that of his traveling companion, presumably a lord, who knew Francis would not be up to the journey and could be a liability. In any event, the dream remains a critical juncture in his legend, and his illness, at least, was real. His bout with the recurring chills and fever of malaria kept him in Spoleto for some time while his companion, presumably, rode on without him.

We follow Francis from Assisi to Spoleto, not only because Spoleto is so pivotal to his legend but also because the high hill town houses a unique Franciscan treasure: a letter Francis wrote in his own hand to Brother Leo. I had seen the only other surviving handwritten document of his, also to Leo, in the lower church in Assisi, but there is something exciting about seeing this second document in a location outside the Franciscan-rich collections in Assisi.

We arrive in Spoleto at noon and, with great anticipation, walk up the long, gently curving Via Filitteria to the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, where the letter is displayed in the Reliquary Chapel. The Rough Guide notes that the duomo is closed between 1:00
P.M.
and 3:00, but as anyone who has been to Italy knows, Italians have their own interpretation of time, and when we reach the astonishingly beautiful twelfth-century cathedral, we find it has closed an hour early and will be
chiuso
until 4:00.

But no matter. Downtime is a gift in Italy, and we spend some of it over a delicious lunch of local sausage, artichokes, and homemade pasta, and while away the rest walking around the graceful, fan-shaped piazza in front of the cathedral, dodging the local children playing soccer, and wondering who all the men carrying bright orange tote bags and milling around the piazza might be. (They turn out to be obstetricians gathered for a convention.)

We are the first into the cathedral when the small, very round priest arrives with an ancient iron key ring the size of a bicycle tire to unlock the door. The cathedral, I quickly discover, is not a model of high technology. Each very dark chapel requires a twenty-five-cent euro coin in a light box to shed temporary electric light on its treasures, including an unfinished fresco by a teenage Pinturicchio. Nervously clutching my coin, I enter the Reliquary Chapel and position myself in front of the case on the wall that holds the letter. But when the light comes on, albeit fleetingly, I can’t believe my eyes. The case is empty.

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.”