On the Road with Francis of Assisi Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Perhaps it was right under this building.” When I ask her if she could refer me to anyone with more knowledge of Francis and medieval Perugia, she shakes her head. “There is nothing about St. Francis in Perugia,” she says. “Go to Assisi.” “What about the church of San Francesco al Prato?” I persist, pointing to the thirteenth-century church marked on the map she’d given me. “It’s closed,” she says.
    We have better luck on a return trip to Perugia with a professional local guide named Inger. The dismissive woman in the commune office had been right about the closing of the church of San Francesco. The church had suffered water damage, Inger tells us, and is being renovated for use as a concert hall. I imagine that would please the young Francis, the troubadour, though in later life he would decry any music that did not contribute to the worship of God.
    As to the medieval dungeon where Francis spent such a miserable year, Inger knows just where it is. We set out at a brisk pace across the windy, high plateau Perugia sits on and along the Piazza Matteotti to the very edge of a sheer cliff into which a five-story building has been built. Inger points at the bottom floor, and resisting an attack of vertigo, I lean over to look straight down at the site where, according to Inger, Francis was imprisoned.
    How bleak it must have been, if Inger is correct—close to being buried alive. I imagine the dampness, the darkness, the airlessness. There is some thought that the prisoners were chained to the walls in the dungeons that were subsequently used to store salt. I am relieved when we turn away from our vantage point and my overwrought imagination begins to fade.
    Perugia, understandably, would never be a favorite venue of Francis, though he would return here often to preach. Several of his miracles were centered in and around Perugia—a mute restored to speech, a cripple restored to physical health. But he persisted in calling it Babylon, and with good reason. The belligerent city not only regularly attacked and pillaged its neighbors but was a den of internal intrigue. Medieval Perugia was known for its deadly poisons, its murders and mutilations, its ritual war of stones, in which teams of men heaved rocks at each other until enough were dead or wounded to signal the game was over.
    Such savagery is hard to imagine as we leave Inger and stroll around Perugia’s beautiful main square, the Piazza IV Novembre, watching its ocher palazzos turn burnt orange in the late afternoon sun. Instead of preparing to slaughter each other, the Perugians we see are preparing for their annual, weeklong Eurochocolate festival, which draws chocolate lovers from all over the world and showcases the city’s own Perugina chocolates.
    The people in the cobbled streets seem very friendly toward each other, unlike their warring medieval predecessors. At one sorry point, recorded in Franciscan annals as the “Curse of Perugia,” the animosity within the city grew so venomous that it interrupted Francis’s sleep, fifteen miles away in Assisi. A vision of the pending carnage of an all-out civil war between knights and citizens, nobles and peasants came to Francis in a dream and led him quickly to Perugia to preach peace. It was not a welcome message.
    I could imagine Francis standing on the steps of Perugia’s duomo, which also fronts on the Piazza IV Novembre, being heckled by the bloodthirsty knights who, Celano writes, “interfered with his words.” The slight friar in the tattered brown habit held his ground against the knights, warning them time and again not to “attack your neighbors with arms, kill and plunder them.” The knights evidently did not heed his warning that “wrath will teach you, for kindness has not,” because shortly thereafter, Perugia descended into civil strife with “unrestrained fury and slaughter,” just as Francis had envisioned.
    But then again, little was sacred to medieval Perugians,