On the Road with Francis of Assisi by Linda Bird Francke Read Free Book Online Page A

Franciscans were scientists, he explains, and among the first to study nature. One of the bronze friars looks heavenward trying to identify the North Star. Another is measuring the distance between the stars with his hand. The third is lying on his back on the ground, smiling, with his hands under his head. “That’s St. Francis,” Father John says, “just looking up at all the stars and having a delightful time.”
    Legends abound along the shaded paths of the
carceri
—the well in the courtyard, which Francis successfully coaxed to fill with water, the riverbed he would empty after a storm because the sound of the rushing water interfered with his prayers, the tree supposedly from the time of Francis that still clings to the side of the precipitous ravine with the aid of metal stakes and guy wires. Birds evidently gathered regularly in the tree to sing to Francis and just as regularly fell silent at his polite request when he wanted absolute quiet to pray.
    We retrace our steps to the courtyard to a tiny chapel with a smoke-blackened ceiling the early friars built in a cave. Along the way we run into a Swiss family wearing sturdy hiking boots and carrying walking staffs. They have just come down a very steep path marked “Sister Moon,” a clearing high in the woods from which the early friars observed the skies, and they are breaking out protein bars to fuel them on the equally steep footpath back to Assisi.
    We leave the
carceri
with some reluctance, unlike Francis, who must have been relieved to distance himself from his early travails with his conscience in the cave. He was making headway, and “his heart was aglow with divine fire,” notes the
Legend of the Three Companions,
but he still had not heard any instructions from the “voice” of Spoleto. Instead, he began to redirect his life on his own. “He was already a benefactor of the poor, but from this time onwards he resolved never to refuse alms to anyone who begged in God’s name, but rather to give more willingly and abundantly than ever before.”
    His preoccupation with the poor spilled over into his home life. His mother, Lady Pica, who is described by all the early chroniclers as deeply religious, was far more sympathetic to Francis’s new charity than was his father. Famine was rampant around Assisi following the devastation of the countryside’s crops by a storm, and the number of hungry and starving had increased dramatically. When Pietro Bernadone was away, as he frequently was, Lady Pica went along with Francis’s request to bake extra loaves of bread for the beggars who came to the door. And she presumably supported or at least turned a blind eye to his new habit of giving away his clothes to the poor when he found himself with no money. “He would give his belt or buckle, or if he had not even these, he would find a hiding place and, taking off his shirt, give it to the beggar for love of God,” reports the
Legend of the Three Companions.
    Seeing the change in her son and the “new ardor which was taking possession of him and filling him with repentance for his past grave sins,” Lady Pica, perhaps, was the one who urged Francis to go on pilgrimage to Rome in that same life-altering year of 1205. It was a long trip, some 120 miles, and it is not known whether he walked or rode on horseback. But no matter. The important part of the legend is what happened to Francis when he got there.

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    The Old Rome
    R OME ,
where Francis identifies with the beggars ·
S AN D AMIANO,
where he finally hears a message from the Lord ·
F OLIGNO,
where he acts on that message—with dramatic results
    S t. Peter’s Basilica looms ever larger from the Via della Conciliazione, the grandiose, column-lined boulevard Mussolini built to the Vatican in the 1930s by razing a medieval neighborhood. We hike across the basilica’s vast and familiar Piazza San Pietro, where thousands of empty white plastic chairs await the faithful for the Pope’s weekly