Assisi

  

 

 

Edward Hutton published "Assisi and Umbria Revisited" in 1953.  He began his account in the city of St. Francis.

Today there is nothing, can be nothing, in Assisi but the memory  of him who took Lady Poverty to wife. Yet the city we see but little resembles what it was in Francis’s day. What we see is not what he saw, but is, in fact, his creation. The city S. Francis knew had no San Francesco, no Sacro Convento, no Santa Chiara, and no Rocca towering over all. The western hill on which the triple church of San Francesco stands, the Collis Infernis or Collis Inferni, was divided from the city, quite outside which it stood, by a deep ravine which was only finally filled up and the upper and lower piazzas of San Francesco constructed in the sixteenth century. Before that the church was reached by a bridge over the ravine. Perhaps from very far off, from Perugia, for instance, we may have an impression of the city as S. Francis knew it, crouched on the skirts of Subasio. But there are, of course, many buildings within the city which he knew well; the Roman Temple, the great façade of the Duomo, and the churches, Santa Maria Maggiore, San Pietro, San Giacomo within the wall, San Damiano and the Carceri without. And he seems to have loved this, his birthplace, so well that, great traveller though he was, he never wanted to leave it, to go far away from it. The places he loved best were Monte Subasio, Rivotorto, the Portiuncula, San Damiano, the island in Lago Trasimeno, and Assisi itself, which he turned to bless with words of love as they bore him to the Portiuncula to die. Hardly one of these places, however, at all resembles what it was in his day, least of all his best-loved Rivotorto and Santa Maria degli Angeli. It is only the wide landscape that is the same and there is surely a divine harmony between the soul of S. Francis and this landscape of the valley of Spoleto which his early biographers seem instinctively to have understood.

 

And yet one finds oneself on his account wandering up and down the steep and climbing ways, through street and piazza where he played as a child, where he went gaily as a young man, which presently saw him begging his bread, and echoed alike with the scorn of his fellows and the irresistible words of his preaching. Here is the house, here is the stable, in which he was born; here the font in which he was baptized. Just beyond the walls is San Damiano where the Crucifix spoke to him. Here before Santa Maria Maggiore he stripped himself and repudiated his earthly father, Pietro Bernadone. There is the house of his first companion, Bernard of Quintavalle. And there in the Vescovado he lay till they bore him out of Porta Moiano on his last journey when he turned and blessed the city he loved, but could no longer see, on the way to S. Mary of the Angels, where he was to die. And finally, here in the great triple church dedicated in his honour, on the Collis Inferni, now the Collis Paradisi, we may venerate his dust.

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, 1953. Pp. 1-3.