Perugia and Assisi

Last weekend, our group went to Assisi, home of St. Francis.

The best night, we hiked up to the Rocca Maggiore, or castle at the top of the hill, and enjoyed wine and cheese while watching the sunset. Assisi is a magical place. Not only is it the pilgrimage site for St. Francis, it is spatially and visually fascinating. In the 1920's most of the stucco facades were removed, exposing the stone structure underneath. A local rose-colored stone is used, mixed with white/yellow stone, and this lends each building its own unique charm.

The tourists are nicer and calmer, and everyone is more polite, perhaps out of respect to the presence of St. Francis. He is buried under the Basilica that shares his name in a quiet, dramatically lit chapel of the lower church. I thought a side chapel filled with relics was one of the more fascinating spaces in the church. The relics included St. Francis's robe, worn by him almost 800 years ago and pieced together with hundreds of patches upon patches, as well as a piece of calf-skin that was placed over his side to help ease the pain of the Stigmata which he received later in life. These relics did not look 800 years old, and were located in a brightly lit, non- air-conditioned room. I have trouble believing that they are the actual relics themselves, but I cannot imagine replacing the originals with duplicates, as that removes all the power of a relic in the first place. Nevertheless, I felt honored and blessed to have the rare opportunity to be in the presecense of such a great force of good in the world.

I imagine it would feel about the same as visiting Ghandi's tomb in New Delhi.

Also-as a side note- We had the BEST bathroom in Assisi. It's nice even by American standards (and, I've noticed, we really are too picky about the size/ quality of our bathrooms) For Italy, it was unheard of.

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