On the Road with Francis of Assisi (32 page)

The cortege finally set out from the Celle di Cortona and, in June 1226, returned Francis safely to the Porziuncola. However grateful Francis must have been to be home, he lasted there for only two weeks. The summer heat was stifling in the wooded valley, making it hard for Francis to breathe. So once more Elias and Francis’s closest friars packed him up and moved him, to a new hermitage, eighteen miles away, high in the mountains above Bagnara.

The scenery changes radically as we approach Bagnara along the old Via Flaminia. The valley narrows, the wooded hills are craggier, and there are very few open fields. We stop briefly, as did Francis, at the walled medieval hill town of Nocera Umbra. The town seems gloomy, but there is good reason. Nocera Umbra was hit very hard by the 1997 earthquake; 80 percent of its old stone houses were damaged, if not destroyed, and its civic symbol, a tall rock tower, was leveled. So we press on, after an artichoke sandwich in a rather desultory coffee bar, to follow Francis to the tiny community of Bagnara.

In its Roman heyday, Bagnara was a spa town, and evidently it still is, though its population of fewer than two thousand does not speak of a thriving spa economy. But the air is definitely cooler in Bagnara’s hills, which would have eased Francis’s breathing. And perhaps the healing powers of Bagnara’s water brought him some relief, though by now Francis was beyond any medicinal cure.

Virtually blind, his spleen and liver enlarged by malarial parasites, his abdomen and legs hideously bloated by the fluid retention of dropsy, the rest of his body emaciated, and his pallor gray from anemia, Francis was obviously not long for this world.

Messengers raced back and forth between Bagnara and Assisi, and plans were formalized for Francis’s final return to the city of his birth in August 1226. Bishop Guido was away, but Francis would stay, under guard, in the Bishop’s Palace. To make sure no one could kidnap him en route, knights were dispatched to bring him safely home. What a poignant scene it must have been. Francis was too weak to ride a horse on his own, so the knights, some of whom were his childhood friends, took turns carrying him in their arms.

Francis was not too weak, however, to give the knights a final lesson in humility. As the procession wound its way through the hills northeast of Assisi, Francis and his escorts stopped in the poor village, now vanished, of Satriano. The hungry knights went door to door trying to buy food and drink but came back empty-handed.

“You didn’t find anything because you trust more in those flies [coins] of yours than in God,” St. Bonaventure quotes Francis. Francis sent the knights back out, advising them this time to “humbly ask for alms” after offering the villagers the “love of God as a reward.” To the knights’ amazement, according to Celano, they “bought more with the love of God than with money.”

Francis and his military escort entered Assisi through the Porta Perlici, which still stands on the northeastern edge of the hill town and bears an 1199 inscription designating it the gateway to the Marches. The knights ensconced Francis in the Bishop’s Palace on the Piazza del Vescovado, then took up guard duty outside. Francis had come full circle, from his childhood nearby in his family’s house; his rudimentary schooling at San Giorgio, now St. Clare’s basilica, just around the corner; his nude renunciation of his father in the palace’s courtyard; and now, his approaching death.

“Brother, what is your prognosis?” Francis asked Buongiovanni, a friend and doctor from Arezzo who came to visit him in the palace. When the doctor replied that, with the grace of God, all would be well, Francis pressed him for the truth. “I am not a coward who fears death,” the
Legend of Perugia
quotes him as saying. “The Lord by his grace and in his goodness, has so closely united me to himself that I am as happy to live as I am to die.” The doctor then told him straight out that his disease was incurable and that he would die either at the end of September or on the fourth day of October. Instead of despairing, Francis exulted at the news and cried out—“Welcome, Sister Death!”

Without further ado, Francis summoned Brother Leo and Brother Angelo to praise Sister Death with him. And together, with the friars fighting tears, Francis added a new and final verse to the Canticle of the Sun:

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death,

From whose embrace no mortal can escape.

Woe to those who die in mortal sin!

Happy those She finds doing your will!

The second death can do no harm to them.

Francis loved the new verse and had his friars sing the entire canticle to him at all hours of the day and night to lift his spirits as well as the morale of the knights guarding the palace. In a clear indication of the irreconcilable differences between the old and new guards of the Franciscan Order, Brother Elias reportedly objected to the singing on the grounds that the joyous sound wafting out of the palace windows was sending the wrong message to the people of Assisi.

“How can he display such great joy when he is going to die?” Elias asked, voicing what he believed to be the people’s confusion. “Would it not be better to think of death?” But Francis had always chosen joy. “Brother, let me rejoice in the Lord and sing his praises in the midst of my infirmities,” he answered his minister general. And the singing continued.

There were other joyous moments at the Bishop’s Palace. Francis, who had virtually stopped eating, had a craving one day for fish. And instantly and miraculously, a brother arrived unannounced from Rieti with a gift “basket containing three well-cooked pike and a quantity of lobster.” Another night he craved parsley, and when an anguished friar told him there was none in the garden, Francis directed him to go out into the darkness and bring him “the first herbs your hand touches.” The handful of wild herbs, Celano reports, turned out to have “a tender stock of parsley in the middle of them,” which Francis ate a bit of and “felt much better.”

But time was running out for Francis, and toward the end of September, heeding the doctor’s timetable for his death, Francis asked to be taken to the Porziuncola. Again, it must have been an amazing scene. His loyal friars carried him down the hill from Assisi on a litter. When they reached a crossroad, which is still there, by an old
lazzaretto,
which is now thought to be the Casa Gualdi, Francis asked his friars to turn the litter around and prop him up so he could “see” Assisi for the last time. Perhaps his vision cleared for an instant so he could take in what is still a stunning view of Assisi from below. And then he blessed the city of his birth.

Francis lingered for a week or so in the infirmary at the Porziuncola. At one point he struggled out of his habit and lay naked on the floor in order to die on the earth in absolute poverty, without even a tunic to his name. Elias could not bear the sight and came up with a brilliant ruse. He commanded Francis, under holy obedience, to accept the tunic, underwear, and hood that he was “lending” him. “And so that you know that they in no way belong to you, I take away all your authority to give them to anyone,” Elias told him. Francis then consented to wear the borrowed clothes.

It was his wish for a specific gray cloth for a burial tunic that brought about one of Francis’s last living miracles. At his request, a brother was just about to depart for Rome with a letter to Lady Jacopa di Settesoli, asking her to send not only the “gray-colored monastic material” but some of his favorite almond-honey cake, when suddenly there was a knock on the door. It was “Brother” Jacopa.

The miracle of her spontaneous arrival multiplied with what she had brought: the exact shroud cloth, the ingredients for his favorite cake, plus incense and wax candles to burn “before the holy body after his death.” She had been told to come to the Porziuncola, she explained to the friars, by a “voice” that had interrupted her prayers in Rome. “Go and visit your father, blessed Francis,” the voice had instructed her, according to the
Legend of Perugia.
“But hurry . . . for if you delay, you will not find him alive.” The voice had also told her what to take.

Francis’s friars busied themselves by having the gray tunic hastily made for his shroud, with sackcloth, at his direction, sewed over it as a “sign of most holy humility and poverty.” Francis was so ill, however, he could eat only a crumb or two of the almond cake Lady Jacopa made for him.

With his last strength, he dictated a letter to the ailing Clare, known as “The Blessing Sent to St. Clare and Her Sisters.” The letter was prompted less by his illness than by the severe bout of illness Clare was suffering at the time and her fear that she would die without seeing him again. “She wept in bitterness of spirit and could not be comforted because she would not be able before her death to see her only father after God, that is blessed Francis,” reports the
Assisi Compilation.
But any meeting was impossible, of course, “since they were both seriously ill.” So he wrote her a note.

The text of the letter Francis sent Clare has never been found, but all the medieval biographies report that it contained his blessing of Clare and his absolution of her for any failings she might have committed. Francis also promised her what she so desperately craved, though, ironically, it would be after his death, not hers. “Let her know, in truth, that before she dies she and all her sisters will see me again and will receive great consolation from me,” Francis instructed the friar bearing the letter to her at San Damiano.

Finally, there were only Francis and his friars in the little infirmary at the Porziuncola. As we stand inside the Cappella del Transito, a restoration of that simple cell inside the massive Santa Maria degli Angeli, it is difficult to sense the intimacy and the anguish that must have filled this space eight hundred years ago. Somewhere, under the acres of marble in this, the seventh largest Christian church in the world, the friars were sitting on the earth around Francis, crying.

Brother Elias was in the cell with Francis. So were Brother Leo and several others among the first companions: Brother Rufino, Brother Giles, Brother Angelo, and Brother Bernard of Quintavalle. Eighteen years had passed since Francis spent the entire night in prayer at the Quintavalle home and converted Bernard, his first friar.

“Write this just as I tell you,” Francis said to Leo. “Brother Bernard was the first brother whom the Lord gave me, as well as the first to put into practice and fulfill most completely the perfection of the Holy Gospel by distributing all his goods to the poor. Because of this and many other prerogatives, I am bound to love him more than any other brother of the entire Order. Therefore, as much as I can, I desire and command that, who ever the Minister General is, he should cherish and honor him as he would me.”

Then it was the other friars’ turn for their blessings. And the call from Francis for bread, which he blessed before giving a piece to each of his brothers. And the reading he asked his friars for, from the Gospel According to St. John. And then Francis, faltering, began to recite Psalm 142. “Lead me out of my prison, that I may give thanks to your name,” he whispered. “Then the just shall gather around me because you have been good to me.”

Francis died just after sunset on October 3, 1226, at the age of forty-five. It is said that the bells of the twelfth-century church of San Stefano in Assisi began tolling spontaneously. His friars, however far-flung, also sensed his passing. One saw his “blessed soul under the appearance of a radiant star carried up on a shining cloud.” Another, many miles away, who was himself at death’s door and unable to speak, suddenly cried out: “Wait for me, Father. Wait! Look, I am coming with you”—and he did. Bishop Guido, too, saw a vision of Francis that night while he was on a pilgrimage to Monte Gargano. “Behold, I am leaving the world and am going to heaven,” Francis said to his old friend. And all the legends began.

We leave the reconstructed chapel where Francis died and exit the cavernous Santa Maria degli Angeli, only to be met by the jarring sound of music, albeit sacred, being broadcast over loudspeakers. After all the hundreds of miles we have traveled with Francis, however, I have learned to blot out intrusions into the simple spaces we have shared with this extraordinary man and his legend. And so I don’t hear the canned music. I hear the sound of larks.

Francis was particularly fond of larks. He admired their dark heads, which he saw as “capuches” or hoods worn by his friars, and their “earth-colored plumage,” because it gave a good example to “religious who ought not to wear garish and choice garments.” He also admired Sister Lark, according to the
Legend of Perugia,
because she is a “humble bird” who eats little and “praises the Lord” in flight.

So it is not surprising that larks marked the moment of his death at the Porziuncola. It is said that an exaltation of larks, which had assembled on the roof of Francis’s hut, suddenly—and inexplicably—took to the air just after sunset, wheeling and singing.

TRAVEL NOTES

We found the various Rough Guides to Italy and Egypt to be most informative and helpful (see bibliography). We prebooked most of our hotels over the Internet and booked our “villa” near Perugia through www.italianvillas.com, phone 800-700-9549.

We rented a series of excellent cars and Italian cell phones from Auto Europe through a referral at www.italianvillas.com. The cell phones, programmed in English and delivered to us in the United States before our departure for Italy, proved invaluable.

We found the following road maps most helpful:

Umbria e Marche, Grande carte stradale
(scale of 1:200,000), published by Touring Club Italiano and available on the Internet or at any good map store, is an excellent map that covers the heart of St. Francis country.

A handy booklet of road maps for Italy, at a scale of 1:300,000, is
Euro-Travel Atlas, Italy,
published by the American Map Corporation of Maspeth, New York, and available through www.italianvillas.com.

An extensive series of first-rate city and provincial maps covering all of Italy (at scales ranging from 1:5,000 to 1:150,000) is produced by Litografia Artistica Cartographic of Florence; individual maps are available on the Internet at www.initaly.com/ads/maps.htm.