On the Road with Francis of Assisi (26 page)

The tiny Chapel of the Magdalene at Fonte Colombo, a hermitage near Rieti, where another doctor vainly tried to cure Francis by searing his temples with a hot poker.
BELOW:
The Greek letter “Tau,” Francis’s symbol, was supposedly etched on the chapel’s window frame by Francis himself.

The Porta Ovile in Siena, through which Francis was carried, mortally ill, to the nearby sanctuary of
Alberino on his final journey home.

The medieval church of
San Stefano, in Assisi, whose bells rang spontaneously at the moment Francis died.

18

Poor Francis

A
SSISI,
where Francis’s Rule is rejected

P
oor Francis. Ill and emaciated, he is sitting slumped at the feet of the minister general at the Pentecost chapter of the order in May 1221. A year has passed since the last chapter, and he is about to present the Rule he has written to the three thousand friars and provincial ministers gathered at the Porziuncola. It has not been a good year. His health is failing, and sadly, his friend Peter of Catania died six months after taking over as head of the order. The order’s new minister general is Brother Elias, and without his permission, Francis cannot even read the Rule he has written to the assembled friars. One of his biographers describes him as having to tug at the bottom of Elias’s habit to get his attention, and permission to speak.

The Rule that Francis presents reflects the many compromises from his original evangelical vision urged on him by the Pope and Ugolino. He has followed the Pope’s instruction to require a probationary year for would-be friars rather than accepting into his order anyone “desiring by divine inspiration to accept this life.” He has reluctantly agreed to allow the Franciscan clergy to have books but “only the books necessary to fulfill their office”; similarly, lay friars who can read are allowed to “possess a psalter,” or Book of Psalms.

Further, the friars, when they are not fasting, are allowed to eat “whatever is placed before them,” a departure from Francis’s own abstemious habit of feigning eating while secreting the food in his lap. And the friars are to be allowed two tunics, one with a hood, unlike the original companions, whom Celano describes as being “content with one tunic, patched at times within and without.”

Even so, many of the newer friars grumble that Francis’s standards are out of touch with reality. Some friars embarking on preaching tours want to travel by horseback instead of on foot, and to take adequate provisions with them. Yet Francis has reinstated the Gospel instruction to his friars to “carry nothing with you on your journey, neither a knapsack, nor a purse, nor bread, nor money nor a staff,” and not to “ride horses unless they are compelled by sickness or great necessity.”

He has also continued to forbid the ownership of property—“The brothers should beware that . . . they do not make any place their own”—although that admonition has already been flouted. Houses are being acquired left and right by the order’s ministers, and some friars, as Francis found in Bologna, are living much too comfortably. It has also become chic among some members of the Church hierarchy to have in their households resident friars, who presumably sleep in beds and share their meals. With all these temptations, fewer friars, except for his original companions and many in the Marches, are content to be pilgrims or live in the humble huts Francis had decreed should be made of mud and wood.

And so, the friars shelve Francis’s Rule and instruct him to rewrite it. The presenting reasons are that the scripture-laced Rule is too long and too vague. But the underlying and long-festering sentiment is that it is too hard, much too hard. Poor, poor Francis. “In his whole life we scarcely find a sadder or more poignant moment,” writes Julien Green in
God’s Fool.
“Francis believed with all his heart that he had received this rule from God. Men judged otherwise.”

19

Following Francis to Italy’s Boot

A
PULIA:
B
ARI,
where Francis turns money into a snake ·
B
RINDISI,
where he may have sailed to Egypt ·
L
ECCE,
where he performs the miracle of the loaves ·
G
AETA,
where the stampede of admirers forces Francis to preach from a boat

T
he light is different in Apulia, the province in the heel of southern Italy’s boot. Compared with the crisp light in the high hill towns of Umbria and Tuscany, Apulia’s light is soft and seems to bear within it its own shade. The diffusion comes from the salt in the air from the Adriatic Sea on Apulia’s east coast and from the Tyrrhenian Sea on its west.

We go to both coasts, as supposedly did Francis on a preaching tour in the eighteen months between the rejection of his Earlier Rule in 1221 and the completion of its revision in 1223. It is hard to believe Francis had the strength to travel all the way down the Adriatic coast to Apulia, but several reputable Franciscan sources, most notably
St. Francis of Assisi—Omnibus of Sources,
record his whereabouts in 1221 and probably 1222 as southern Italy. Many of the dates associated with Francis are guesstimates and, like political polls, have an accuracy margin of several percentage points; but we haven’t been to Apulia, so we put our trust in the
Omnibus
and head south, too.

We look for signs of Francis in the Crusader port city of Bari, where he was reportedly a guest in the huge, reconstructed twelfth-century seaside Castle Svevo. The centerpiece of Bari is the wondrous eleventh-century Papal Basilica of St. Nicholas, the patron saint of children and, of course, the model for Santa Claus, whose bones were spirited here from Turkey in 1087 and still lie in the basilica’s crypt. But we find Francis in the aptly named church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, across the street from the castle.

A stone tablet in the entry to the church commemorates Francis’s stay in the castle, and a padlocked, velveted niche off the nave holds the small bell, the Campanello di San Francesco d’Assisi, that Francis used to call the people to hear him preach. We ring the precious relic ourselves, with the permission of Don Filippo, the church’s secular priest, giddy with the possibility that we’re holding in our hands something Francis actually held in his.

We follow Francis farther south along the Adriatic coast road to the Crusader port of Brindisi, from which many think he set sail for Egypt. I fantasize that it is on this road, identified only vaguely by Celano as “near Bari,” that Francis graphically illustrated the evil of money to a young friar. The legend involves a sack of coins lying abandoned on the road and the young friar who urged Francis to take the money and distribute it to the poor. But Francis suspected the sack of money to be a lure of the devil. Instead of touching the money, he “withdrew about a stone’s throw and concentrated on holy prayer.” He then ordered the young friar to pick up the bag, and suddenly, instead of coins, “a large snake slid out of the bag.” The young friar had been taught a lesson he would never forget. “Brother,” Francis said to him, “to God’s servants money is nothing but a devil and a poisonous snake.”

Padre Salvatore, a thoroughly modern forty-one-year-old Franciscan friar wearing jeans and a two-day stubble, greets us at the Franciscan church and convent. He takes us on the medieval pilgrim road, the Provinciale San Vito, to Brindisi’s busy commercial port, passing the twelfth-century Tancredi Fountain, from which the Crusaders and possibly Francis drank on their way to embark for the Holy Land. The modern pilgrimage route is by air: UNESCO flies humanitarian aid to Iraq and Afghanistan from Brindisi.

So far on this journey to Apulia we have seen no indication that Francis preached here in 1221 or 1222. Most of the medieval history involving him along this coastal section of southern Italy concerns the Crusades and, in Brindisi, includes the recently renovated fourteenth-century Crusader
ospedale
or hospital of Santa Maria del Casale. Padre Salvatore takes us to see this stunning Crusader rest house, which the transient pilgrims and knights frescoed brilliantly with biblical scenes and depictions of Crusaders with their horses, shields, and flags bearing the Crusader cross. Francis’s connection to Santa Maria del Casale is that it was built over a little chapel in which he prayed and which contained one of his favorite paintings of Mary. A Franciscan convent was established after Francis’s stay here, and the remains of its arched cloister still stand next to Santa Maria del Casale, shaded by palm trees.

We leave the jovial Padre Salvatore, who operates a local Franciscan radio station named Brother Sun, Sister Moon, and press farther south to the ornate, Baroque city of Lecce. Every inch of the many medieval palazzos and churches remaining in the old city seems intricately carved with saints, knights, flowers, animals, the sun and the moon. The dizzying display of sculptured artistry, made possible by the honey-colored and easily worked local sandstone, makes our frustrating visit here worthwhile.

The frustration begins with our fruitless half-hour search for the Centro Storico, a sixteenth-century palazzo turned B and B we are booked in, somewhere in the maze of streets in the old city. Mauro Bianco, the young owner of the B and B, has anticipated the impossibility of visitors finding it on their own and offers his cell phone number with each reservation. We finally succumb and, humbled, follow Mauro on his motor scooter through one alleyway after another to fetch up at the beguiling B and B, where our funky bright red room is up fifty-two steps on the roof.

That frustration resolved, we move on to the next. According to local legend, Francis performed the miracle of the “multiplication of the bread” in Lecce, at the palazzo of the Perrone family. When he went to the palazzo asking for bread for his monks, as friars are called in Apulia, the servant said there wasn’t any. Francis insisted that she look in the cupboard, and lo and behold, she found fresh, hot bread. The family is said to have commemorated the miracle by carving an angel holding a piece of bread on the façade of their palazzo and adding an inscription describing the event inside the palazzo’s front door. But when we set out to find the building, which Mauro has located in a Lecce reference book of medieval palazzos, the address turns out to be an uncarved and quite modern building subdivided into apartments.

Our last hope of finding a trace of Francis is to locate the little cell where he is said to have rested during his visit here. We are successful in the thirteenth-century church of San Francesco, where just outside a chapel wonderfully frescoed with scenes from Francis’s life we find a roped-off opening in the floor and, visible below, a stone cell only six feet long and three feet wide. Our thrill of discovery is dampened, however, by the date of 1219 the church custodian attaches to Francis’s stay in the cell. That date, too, seems to involve the Crusades and supports those who believe Francis embarked for Egypt in 1219 from Bari or Brindisi and stopped in nearby Lecce en route.

We leave Apulia with some frustration and drive northwest to the Tyrrhenian seaport of Gaeta. For all of Apulia’s pleasant, tourist-free wonders—the province’s singular and ancient
trulli,
conical-roofed houses and farm sheds constructed, without mortar, with the area’s thin, gray stone; the cactus-lined roads through back-to-back vineyards, which produce one-tenth of the wine drunk in Europe; and mile after mile of ancient olive groves—the dates remain wrong for Francis and his preaching tour of southern Italy. Our last hope is Gaeta, where St. Bonaventure reports that Francis, while preaching, had to take refuge in a small boat and finish his sermon from the sea after the overenthusiastic crowd on the beach “rushed upon him in order to touch him.”

And bingo! It was sometime during the winter of 1222 and early spring of 1223, we are told by Professor Fernando Robbio, a former English teacher and local historian, that Francis delivered his seaborne sermon here. “We don’t know why he came here, but the dates are certain,” he says. Just where Francis stayed, nobody knows—his cell has never been found—but Professor Robbio thinks it is buried somewhere in the convent Francis founded next to the site where Gaeta’s San Francesco church subsequently rose on a high cliff overlooking the sea.

We pace up and down the old convent’s cloister corridor with Professor Robbio, who insists that Francis also walked up and down here in 1222. The convent is now a children’s center, the Oratorio Don Bosco, which makes it difficult to conjure up a meditative Francis amid the teenage frenzy of an upcoming soccer game. But Dr. Robbio’s enthusiasm is infectious—and understandably so.

Gaeta figures heavily in the medieval biographies of Francis. It was here that he vented his wrath on two brothers who let their beards grow long, cursing them for setting a bad example. His outburst over this seemingly innocuous transgression suggests that it occurred during the painful rebellion within his order. “By you, most holy Lord, and by the whole court of heaven, and by me, your little one,” Celano quotes him as saying, “may they be cursed who break and destroy by their bad example what you earlier built up, and do not cease to build up, through holy brothers of this religion!”

Francis also performed miracles in Gaeta, one the curing of a paralytic whose condition had been made worse by a doctor; the other a man named Bartolomeo, whose neck had been crushed by a wooden beam during the “construction of the church of blessed Francis.” Bartolomeo was returned to life by a vision of Francis and eleven of his brothers bringing him a lamb. The next morning a healthy Bartolomeo went back to work on the church, startling his fellow workers, who “had left him half-dead.”

The original thirteenth-century church in Gaeta that almost killed Bartolomeo was commissioned by Emperor Frederick II and was replaced in the nineteenth century by the current and gorgeous Gothic church built by another emperor, Ferdinand II, to commemorate Pope Pius IX’s flight to Gaeta in 1848 during a revolution in Rome. Of all the churches dedicated to St. Francis, this splendid church in Gaeta, stuccoed in pale coral, becomes my favorite, despite its imperfection.

A gale on February 9, 1999, blew a heavy exterior cross off its perch on the church and sent it crashing onto the roof, leaving a gaping hole. The church has been open to the elements ever since but closed to the public, disappointing many families all over Italy who had booked it months in advance for their children’s weddings and baptisms. I can see its national appeal when Dr. Robbio, who is leading a local fund-raising effort to fix the roof, graciously unlocks the church and lets us into its wounded and poignant interior.

Life-size sculptures of the twelve apostles line the nave, covered with bits of the roof. The wooden pews are dotted with pieces of coral-colored stucco, and the marble floor is covered with bits of rock and fine grit. This haunted space, inhabited by pigeons and watched over by a carved wooden likeness of St. Francis in a wood-and-glass cabinet, is nonetheless spectacular. The light coming through the tall, narrow, green, yellow, and blue stained glass windows illuminates the church’s massive coral-colored columns and their white tracery, bathing the space in a sort of orange glow. I feel like I’m sitting inside a Creamsicle and immediately contribute to the church’s restoration fund.

It is not known from which beach Francis had to retreat by boat to escape the zealous natives of Gaeta. Our hotel is on the harbor, not the beach, and overlooks the USS
La Salle,
a command ship of the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet; we wake up every morning to “The Star-Spangled Banner” being played over loudspeakers. Gaeta’s broad crescent beach, rimmed with hotels, is on the southern side of the rocky promontory and may well have been the site of Francis’s sermon in 1222.

Another possibility is the nearby Grotta del Turco, or Turk’s Grotto, at the base of Monte Orlando, where Saracen pirates terrorized Gaeta’s shipping in the ninth century. The dramatic, wave-washed grotto is reached by steep stone steps through the sort of narrow rock cleft favored by Francis, and ends at the sea in the small Chapel of the Crucifix. The chapel is wedged between two towering rocks believed to have been rent when the entire mountain split in the earthquake at the moment Jesus died.

Francis, as we well know, shared that belief. And in the early spring of 1223, presumably after he left Gaeta, he headed north to the Rieti Valley, where he sought out a similar and equally dramatic rock fissure at the verdant hermitage of Fonte Colombo. It was at this historic hermitage, known as the Franciscan Mount Sinai, that Francis would spend the forty days of Lent looking for divine guidance in rewriting his rejected Rule.