On the Road with Francis of Assisi (7 page)

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

A
SSISI,
where Francis repudiates his father and is reborn ·
T
HE
S
AN
V
ERECONDO MONASTERY,
where he nearly dies ·
G
UBBIO,
where he is saved ·
A
SSISI,
where he returns to rebuilding San Damiano

A
ssisi’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.

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 re-created 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.