The View from a Drawbridge

This first section is a brief explanation of my Italy blog posts, which were inspired by my 2-week trip to Italy in May, 2025. Feel free to skip this section if you’ve read it before.

Dear Reader, If you read my Italy posts in the order in which they’ve come out, it may seem as though we hopped back and forth all over the country, but I have decided not to write these posts sequentially. I want to write about the things that interest me most, as the spirit moves me. For some topics, I may even combine cities. I hope that by doing so, you’ll find it a lot more interesting than if I just give you a tedious day by day description of our itinerary, as if I were your Aunt Mabel forcing you to sit down and watch all her Super 8 films of the family road trip to Niagara Falls from 1966.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about how I’m approaching this travelogue-within-a-blog, please let me know in the comments below!

Neither Dear Husband nor I are Catholic, but, oddly enough, we still have a favorite saint. We have an affinity for St. Francis of Assisi, Patron Saint of animals, ecology, and the environment. He’s also associated with peace and love. (You might say he was the hippie posterchild for the Middle Ages.) And I defy anyone, even the most hard-hearted person on earth, to read the Prayer of St. Francis and not, at a bare minimum, appreciate the pure decency of the sentiment behind it.

According to many websites, including this one, he ranks up there in the top ten most popular saints, but how they come up with that data is hard to imagine. No one can even say with certainty how many saints there actually are. This article takes you through the very complicated math, and based on the author’s calculations, and given that the article was written in 2012, an extremely rough estimate is that there are at least a thousand by now. The numbers vary widely. (You’d think the Vatican would want to keep better track of them.)

Regardless of the number of saints participating in this particular popularity contest, Francis is our guy. Because of this, we decided that we’d go to Assisi during our trip to Italy and see the soil from which such an amazing person sprang. We’d only have time for a day trip, so I started doing some research so that we could make the most of what little time we had.

I quickly discovered that the number one thing to do in Assisi, of course, is visit the Papal Basilica and Sacred Convent of Saint Francis in Assisi. I mean, that’s just common sense. And it does look absolutely gorgeous. It consists of an upper church and a lower church, and it includes the Tomb of St. Francis. The lower church was finished in 1230. At that point St. Francis’ body was “concealed” there for fear it would be stolen. The upper church was completed in 1253.

During all that hubbub, the location of St. Francis’ body was forgotten. (Minor detail.) But his remains were rediscovered in 1818, beneath the floor of the lower church. (Of course! And yippee!). That’s when they built his crypt so that the faithful could visit him.

Another popular site to visit in Assisi would be the Basilica of St. Clare. She was one of St. Francis’ first followers, and was also founder of the Poor Clares, which is an order for women in the Franciscan tradition. This basilica, too, looks quite beautiful, and includes her crypt, as well as a crucifix that supposedly spoke to St. Francis.

You can also find the spot where St. Francis was born, shop along the street named after him for all things Saint-Franciscified, and stop by Chiesa Nuova, which is a church that was built where St. Francis’ home once stood. There, you can still see the doorway to the house and the stairwell where his father used to lock him up. (I’m thinking St. Francis wouldn’t feel particularly nostalgic about that place.) Another pretty church.

Anyone who visited those sites would come away quite satisfied that they’d gotten a comprehensive Assisi experience. And they wouldn’t be wrong. There’s no shame in that. But are you getting the sense that we didn’t visit any of those places? If so, you’re correct.

We didn’t want the Assisi experience. We wanted the St. Francis experience. And the more I read about historic Assisi, the more I realized that we wouldn’t feel the spirit of St. Francis there at all. None of those sites existed when he was alive, and the ambience they create doesn’t sound very Francis-friendly.

A recurring theme kept cropping up when I read reviews of Assisi. It’s tacky, crowded, and inauthentic. Some called it Religious Las Vegas. Others called it Religious Disney World. The general opinion seemed to be that St. Francis himself wouldn’t want to visit the place. And given that Pope Francis, our guy’s namesake, had just passed away, millions of Catholics had descended upon Rome in particular and Italy in general for the conclave, so the usual horrible Assisi crowds would probably be much, much worse.

So we skipped all the beautiful basilicas and the shops selling the St. Francis tong-tinglers and floo-flounders and had no regrets. Instead, we headed toward the Eremo delle Carceri, a hermitage that is nestled in an isolated gorge on Monte Subasio, 4 kilometers above Assisi. As with the places mentioned above, the hermitage didn’t exist when St. Francis was alive, but he frequently came to the gorge where it now stands, to pray and get away from the very things we were trying to avoid in downtown Assisi.

I think he’d approve of the place. It remains nearly as isolated as it did in his day, and it isn’t easy for tourists to get to unless they have a rental car, are willing to pay for a long taxi ride, or have the ability to take on an hour-long uphill hike, so it doesn’t get the crowds that downtown Assisi does. No one tries to sell you anything inside the hermitage grounds. There is a small souvenir area right outside the entrance gate, but it’s unobtrusive and easily avoided if you don’t wish to indulge. Yes, this would be a much slower, quieter, more St. Francis-like pace. We couldn’t wait to get there.

As we bypassed Assisi proper and headed up to the hermitage, I read aloud about St. Francis’ life from various websites, just as you can. We discovered a lot of things we didn’t previously know, such as:

• He was a bit of a hellraiser and a spendthrift in his youth.
• He created the first live nativity scene one Christmas.
• In 1202, during a military expedition that Assisi mounted against the nearby town of Perugia, he was captured and imprisoned for a year.
• His father was a prosperous silk merchant, and Francis was so at odds with his focus on material wealth that he renounced his inheritance and began wandering as a beggar in the hills.
• We do not know for certain, but it seems that both his parents died before he did, which means they most likely never knew that their son turned out to be more than some crazy, rebellious vagabond.
• His favorite dish was shrimp pie.
• He also preached in Egypt, Spain, Jerusalem, and Sicily (which wasn’t part of Italy at the time).
• When he famously received the stigmata, he also began to go famously blind, but what we did not know is that the treatment he received for it was cauterizing his eyes with hot irons. (Needless to say this did not restore his vision.)
• He died about two years after receiving the stigmata (Frankly, I’d have been done after the cauterization), and was declared a saint about two years after he died. The lower church of the papal basilica where his body was buried, hidden, lost, and recovered was completed about 2 years after that. This quick progression is most likely why so many of the significant places in his life have been preserved.

So, having expanded our knowledge of Saint Francis during the drive, we finally arrived at the hermitage. It felt cleansing after so many days of rushing from one crowded venue to the next. Cars are not allowed on the property, and the walk from the front gate is a relatively long one, but that allows the place to maintain its bubble of pure tranquility.

Have you ever had that feeling of sudden calm, as if your blood pressure just returned to normal, when you hadn’t even realized that it had been high? That is what entering the grounds of this hermitage felt like. Pure serenity. All this property had been given to St. Francis by the Benedictines in 1215, and it has been a peaceful refuge ever since. You can feel it in the very air you breathe. And, my God, the views!

Hermits have been coming to this grotto, with its many natural caves, for centuries. When St. Francis first came, there was nothing there but a tiny oratory, but he kept coming back. I can understand why. This is not the type of forest that hobbits would walk through with an impending sense of doom. It’s the kind of woods where Winnie the Pooh and Piglet might amble up to you and, in hushed yet friendly tones, offer to hold your hand and show you around, and then leave you in peace.

The ”Carceri” in the hermitage’s name, in modern Italian, means jail. But back then, it was more like a refuge to isolate oneself. Instead of being a place where your freedom is gone as the word implies today, it’s a place of total freedom, a place where no one and nothing will bother you. (I’d make a perfect hermit if I could have a climate-controlled cave with a mattress, a steady supply of books, and pizza delivered by someone I didn’t have to speak to.)

The hermitage itself was built, a little bit at a time, around and over the places where St. Francis slept and prayed. And the amazing thing is that they managed to do so without disturbing any of those places. The hard, tiny, uneven slab of stone on which he slept, and even the holly oak where he preached to the birds, remain untouched. The architecture fits in with the land around it, and molds itself to the shape of the grotto. The various architects allowed nature to dictate the shape of things, rather than forcing nature to bend to the will of man.

I genuinely think St. Francis would be happy with the way the place turned out. I know he’d be pleased that Franciscan Monks still live there and maintain the property to this day. I have to say, too, that it was the most spotless place we saw in all of Italy. That hermitage is lovingly cared for.

I had really looked forward to spending a few hours meditating in some of the many places in the surrounding forest where St. Francis went to commune with nature, but unfortunately a series of SNAFUS delayed our departure from Florence that morning. As with so many places where I can feel my soul making a connection, I left that magical hermitage feeling as though I wasn’t supposed to do so. There’s never enough time, is there?

Since coming back home, during times of stress, I sometimes close my eyes and imagine myself back there. It’s one of just a handful of places in the world that have made me think that the ability to be free of all emotional encumbrance is attainable; that it is possible to be light of heart and light of spirit. It comforts me to know that such places exist.

Incidentally, I also discovered something really, really weird about St. Francis while writing my next Italy blog post. I decided to let that information stay with that post rather than include it in this one. I wanted to let myself fangirl in peace for a brief, shining moment. You’ll see what I mean.

Never fear. I still think the guy is awesome. It’s just that when I picture him now, he no longer seems flawless. Perhaps that’s for the best.