On the Road with Francis of Assisi (8 page)

Good fortune reportedly came his way from a merchant family named Spadalonga, who gave Francis the first charity he’d received since he left Assisi—and perhaps even saved his life. Francis had befriended one of the Spadalonga sons, thought to be Federico, but nobody knows where or why. There is conjecture that they were imprisoned together in Perugia, that Federico was the unidentified friend who had accompanied Francis on his secret lamentations in the cave near Assisi, that Francis and young Spadalonga had met in a merchants’ guild.

In any event, Federico’s act of charity was to give Francis a tunic and cloak to wear, replacing the inadequate rags that had obviously suffered on his perilous trip from Assisi. Presumably the family also gave him food and shelter, not only on that visit but on so many subsequent visits that the thirteenth-century church of San Francesco della Pace, the church we are waiting to enter, incorporated the Spadalongas’ home and warehouse, then outside the walls of Gubbio. The room Francis slept in is preserved just off the church’s sacristy in what is called the Chapel of Peace.

The massive church, when it opens in the late afternoon, tells the story of the cloak giving over and over—in a stained glass window, in a bronze relief, in the inscription on a stone wall leading to the Chapel of Peace:
“Qui presso il fondaco degli Spadalonga Francesco d’Assisi, evangelista della pace, e del bene trove asilo e conforto al principio della sua conversione.—1206
.
”
A rounded arch, presumably representing the doorway to the Spadalonga house, frames the entrance to the simple chapel, along with an old bell and rope that offers an irresistible invitation to pull.

For all the pride Gubbio takes in the legend of the Spadalongas’ charity, the city is more popularly known for another legend—Francis and the wolf. Indeed, the miracle of Francis and the wolf, presumably a different wolf from the one terrorizing farmers near the Abbazia di Vallingegno, almost defines Gubbio. There is a huge bronze sculpture of Francis with the wolf in the garden just outside the church and another near the Porta Romana gate into the city. The Rough Guide lists San Francesco e il Lupo (wolf) and the Taverna del Lupo as two of the city’s most popular restaurants. The saint and the wolf appear on souvenir ceramic tiles and mugs and wall hangings in shops all over Gubbio. Everyone loves the miracle of Francis and the wolf.

The Gubbio legend began when a wolf, described on one of the sculptures as
“un grandissimo lupo, terribile et feroce,”
was terrorizing Gubbians by killing livestock and farmers alike. The good people were scared to go outside the city walls until Francis arrived on a visit—and decided to confront the wolf himself. The people begged him not to, but off he went toward the forest and soon encountered the
grandissimo lupo
slouching toward him, teeth bared. And the miracle begins.

Francis stopped the wolf in midstride, according to
Little Flowers of St. Francis,
by making the sign of the cross. He then ordered “Brother Wolf” to come to him, which the wolf summarily did and meekly “lay down at the Saint’s feet as though it had become a lamb.” After scolding the wolf for committing “horrible crimes,” Francis proceeded to negotiate peace with the beast. Would he promise to stop his killing spree if the people of Gubbio promised to give him food every day? The wolf nodded his head, then placed his paw in Francis’s hand to cement the pledge. Francis and the wolf, now walking beside him “like a very gentle lamb,” returned to the marketplace, where a huge crowd had gathered.

After delivering a sermon from a rock—now enshrined in the church of San Francesco—Francis exacted a promise from the people of Gubbio to “feed the wolf regularly.” They evidently did. “It went from door to door for food. It hurt no one and no one hurt it,” recounts the
Little Flowers of St. Francis.
The Gubbians were even sorry when the wolf died two years later and erected a shrine over its burial site on the Via Globo. In a startling validation of the legend, an excavation of the shrine in the late nineteenth century is said to have revealed the skeleton of a wolf, with its
feroce
teeth and skull intact.

So powerful was the legend of the wolf among early Franciscans that in 1213 the bishop of Assisi persuaded the Benedictines to give Francis and his friars La Vittorina, a tiny church just outside the current city walls, where the taming of the wolf took place. We have a rather difficult time finding the church in the confluence of roads looping around it, but we manage, guided by a modern bronze sculpture of a barefoot, tattered Francis being licked in the face by the adoring wolf. We clearly are not the only ones to have sought out the legendary shrine: Stuffed in Francis’s sculpted bronze hand is a bouquet of fresh red roses.

I want to digress for a moment here to explain why I am including so many of Francis’s miracles and in such detail. Some of his modern biographers downplay or even exclude the many miracles attributed to him. They are more concerned with Francis’s spiritual development and the rapid growth of the Franciscan movement. That, of course, is understandable and entirely relevant, but I think diminishing the miracles misses an instructive and charming dimension of the Franciscan legend. Obviously, there’s no way to prove the miracles, which if taken literally often seem silly. One has to suspend disbelief and not only give in to the mysticism that laced medieval times but factor in a political aspect as well.

Francis’s medieval biographers, all of whom were Franciscan friars, were determined to present him as a messenger of God on earth and thus armed him with all sorts of otherworldly powers. They were also determined to confirm and maintain his status as a saint, which gives even more credence to their emphasis on miracles. That they were successful goes without saying, but their body of evidence seems far less relevant and even embarrassing today to some modern Franciscan friars.

“Yes, that
supposedly
happened here,” says Padre Tonino, a friar we meet at the Franciscan church in Alessandria, Lombardy. We have gone miles out of our way to the attractive, quite modern city because eight centuries ago Celano had recorded a charming miracle there, performed on Francis’s behalf, after a dinner party.

The legend holds that Francis’s host in Alessandria, where he had come to preach, was so thrilled to have Francis at his table that he ordered the ultimate delicacy—a seven-year-old capon—to be served for the meal. A wicked man, posing as a beggar, came to the door during dinner and received as alms a piece of the capon from Francis. But he did not eat it. Instead, the next day, hoping to expose the humble Francis as a closet hedonist, the wicked man (described as a “son of Belial” by Celano) waved the incriminating capon to a crowd gathered to hear Francis preach so the people could “see what kind of man this Francis is.” But his scheme backfired when the capon in his hand turned miraculously into an everyday fish.

It was that documented story of Francis in Alessandria that had brought us to the city, but to Father Tonino, as to many other friars we talk to all over Italy, it is the spiritual legacy of Francis and the very real work they are doing now that identifies their faith, not medieval capons turning into fish.

Father Tonino, for example, an attractive man of fifty with close-cropped hair and cheerful brown eyes, was a missionary in Zaire until his mission was burned, rebuilt, and then bombed. He now feeds upward of thirty poor people a night in Alessandria with the help of volunteers and five resident friars. The cloister of his quite modern church is not reserved for contemplative prayer but has been turned into a miniature soccer field for local children. And a sunny, new meeting room, next to the church’s massive library under reconstruction, sports a colorful painting by a group of ten-year-olds, which includes not only St. Francis asleep in St. Clare’s arms but also a portrait of the Italian author and native Alessandrian Umberto Eco.

Like the people he serves, Father Tonino lives very much in the here and now. “Excuse me, I must go to work now,” he says as a young man enters the church and steps into the confessional.

I understand the impatience and even embarrassment of today’s friars toward the miracles, but I think they are instructive. They are filled with the mystery and often the superstitions of the medieval age—seven-year-old capons, for example, were believed to have precious stones in their entrails, while eight-year-old capons were reserved for a king. The miracles also speak to the very real fears and dangers of the time: predatory wild animals, life-snuffing diseases, crippling injuries, poverty, drought, floods, famine, and violence, always violence. Because medieval doctors had very little ability to cure anything, injury or illness, people naturally turned to the healing powers of the godly—and hoped for a miracle.

One of my favorites, also recorded by Celano, occurred in Gubbio. A woman whose hands were “so crippled that she could do no work at all with them” hurried to Francis during one of his visits to the town and begged him to touch them. “Moved to pity,” he did so, and presto, her hands were cured. What makes this miracle so beguiling is that she did not fall on her knees to praise God or instantly become a Franciscan convert but instead ran home to make a cheese cake for Francis “with her own hands.”

Francis must have recovered his physical strength in Gubbio, thanks to the generosity of the Spadalonga family. And he did not waver from his search for spiritual strength. The brigands who set upon him in the forest and the Benedictine monks who did not succor him merely reinforced his conviction in his new calling. In the spirit of “the things that formerly made you shudder will bring you great sweetness and content,” he spent his time taking care of the lepers at a nearby leprosarium before setting out again for Assisi.

Francis left the lepers in Gubbio in the summer of 1206 to return to restoring the little ruined church of San Damiano. He still took the mission from Christ to rebuild his church literally. Collecting stones for the project was in order, but Francis soon realized it would take many more stones than he could glean from the surrounding land. So he decided, for the first time, to beg.

“Whoever gives me a stone will get a reward from the Lord,” he evidently called out to the citizens of Assisi. “Whoever gives me two stones will get two rewards.” And so on. When that did not work, he would break into song, singing the praises of the Lord, in French.

One can only imagine the stupefaction of the Assisians who for years had heard Francis singing heroic ballads and love songs and now found him singing to the Lord and dressed in a hermit’s tunic on the back of which he had etched a cross with a brick. Perhaps the stones he started lugging back to San Damiano were given to him out of pity or just to get rid of him, but he eventually had enough to start rebuilding the church.

It was hard work, too hard for Francis. He had never been a particularly strong person, and he had never really recovered his health from his imprisonment in Perugia. The old priest at San Damiano was worried about him and started giving Francis larger portions and choicer selections of whatever food he had, but Francis soon caught on to the priest’s sacrifice. And another moment in the legend was solidified: Francis decided to go door to door in Assisi and beg for his food.

Assisians were well used to beggars, but to have young Francis Bernadone, the party animal who had always lavished money on food and drink for his friends, come to the door with a begging bowl was beyond comprehension. Some of them must have filled his bowl, because Francis did not starve to death, but the quality of what they gave him was questionable if not insulting. “When he saw his bowl full of all kinds of scraps, he was struck with horror,” writes Celano, “but mindful of God and conquering himself, he ate the food with joy of spirit.”

A particularly awkward transaction took place when Francis, who had also taken to begging for oil to light San Damiano’s lamps, arrived at one house to discover his former fellow revelers partying inside. In one of the more human moments recorded by his biographers, Francis was struck with “bashfulness and retraced his steps.” He then “rebuked” himself and, after passing “judgment on himself,” returned to the scene of his humiliation and successfully begged for the oil “in a kind of spiritual intoxication.”

His father and brother were evidently embarrassed beyond measure by Francis’s antics. And understandably so. The snickering in Assisi about the fancy man-about-town transformed into a tattered, French-spouting beggar for God must have been mortifying. There is no further mention of Francis’s mother in the early biographies, but his brother, Angelo, merits at least one venomous story. Seeing Francis shivering with cold one day and struggling to carry a load of stones, Angelo turned to a friend and said, “Tell Francis to sell you a pennysworth of sweat,” to which Francis cheerfully and predictably replied, “Indeed, I will sell my sweat more dearly to my Lord.”

Pietro di Bernadone remains the same, particularly unpleasant, character in the early biographies. Every time the status-seeking merchant saw his former son on the streets of Assisi, according to Celano, he “would lash out at him with curses.” To protect himself from his father, who must still have frightened him, Francis persuaded a local outcast, with whom he shared his alms, to stand in for his father. Every time Pietro di Bernadone cursed him, Francis would ask—and receive—a paternal blessing from the ragged father figure.

But it was the restoration of San Damiano that Francis cared about the most. And slowly, with the masonry skills he had presumably learned as a teenager from building the defensive walls around Assisi, he finished. It was the spring of 1208, almost exactly two years after he stripped naked outside the bishop’s residence and traded in Pietro di Bernadone for a heavenly father.

His biographers claim that others helped Francis rebuild San Damiano, drawn perhaps by his joy and good humor, not to mention his melodious singing voice. And perhaps that is true. Or perhaps they were drawn by his grandiose and quite outrageous prophecy, delivered loudly in French, of course, that San Damiano was no mere church but would someday be a monastery, as Celano puts it, for “the holy virgins of Christ.” In other words—for women.