Friday the 26th was Boxing Day and Fr Richard and I were scheduled to make a two day trip to Assisi and Venice. We left Rome about 9:30am and three hours later the train pulled into Assisi. There was some beautiful mountain scenery from the train but I think this was the coldest place we had been too so far, it was very very chilly!
Assisi is of course the birth place of the great saint Francis and the birth place of the Franciscan spiritual family. The mission of St Francis is one that continues to touch the hearts of many and vocations to the friars have continued when many other orders experienced vocational droughts. Before going up to the actual town of Assisi on the mountain we walked over to the Basilica of Mary of the Angels. This Basilica is built right over the top of the little chapel in which St Francis was given his vocation from God and where he began to receive friars. The little chapel sits right in the middle of the basilica and would once have been surrounded by forest. We shuffled in to kneel where the saint would have kneeled, and asked his intercession. The basilica itself is beautiful. It has a different feel to the many churches that we have visited in Rome. Each one of the churches we have visited has its own beauty but this one seems more peaceful. It has stunning frescos on the walls like the other churches in Rome but I don’t know what it was, it was just a special place.
We then got a bus up the mountain to the town of Assisi. I don’t know how you differentiate, it is all Assisi but the area up the mountain is like the Franciscan heart of Assisi. The town is more than just churches, there are hotels and houses and restaurants but it all operates in the shadow of the Basilica of St Francis. In this Basilica, in the crypt below the main crypt lays the tomb of this simple saint. The altar and dome of the basilica sit directly over his tomb in the same way that the altar sits over the tomb of St Peter in Rome. It was really great to be able to see his tomb, it is basically a stone coffin which looks like it lies in the space of a cave and you can walk all the way around it. In the niches of the stone many people place photos of their loved ones, asking for the intercession of St Francis. One can’t light a votive candle before the tomb but instead you bring an unlit candle to the front and put it in a basket where the friars light them as the altar candles on the altar which sits against the tomb.
There is also the opportunity to visit a couple of pivotal places in the life of Francis. One is the rose garden. The story goes that in the midst of a particular set of temptations against purity Francis threw himself into the rose bushes and was granted the gift of purity from that moment on. One can now take a leaf from the rose bush attached to a little holy card and people have found it to be a help and reminder in their own times of trial. A little further down is the cell in which Francis died. When he was dying he asked to be placed in the lowest and simplest place and so his fellow friars brought him to this cell which is partially below the ground, it is only about a metre high but he died there in the way he had lived, simple humility.
Like all the other religious places there are a thousand souvenir shops and we stopped into see what they were selling. There are some cute little statues of St Francis with the animals and there are also coloured tiles of various scenes as the times are the specialty in that part of Italy.
We only had five hours in Assisi before we were back on the train headed for Venice so we unfortunately did not have time to get to San Damiano church or the church of St Clare but I really liked Assisi, it is a deeply spiritual place.
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