Medieval paths lead to the places most loved by St. Francis: the Sanctuary of La Verna, the holiest mountain in the world, and the Basilica of Assisi, one of the oldest gothic buildings in Italy and a sublime expression of the creative genius of Giotto.
The first time I saw Assisi I was in the valley below. It’s an ancient valley in Umbria, the “green heart of Italy,” where golden wheat fields and green woodlands are interspersed by irregular islands of wildflowers, where the reds, blues, yellows, and purples of the petals and the multicolored wings of butterflies flutter beneath a gleaming sky.
Lifting my eyes, my sight was caught by the powerful buttresses standing out on the steep ridge of the hill, fifty-three beautiful and impressive arches that support the Sacred Convent and the Basilica of San Francesco. These mammoth ramparts, and the harmonious arches that follow one upon the other like the spans of an ancient Roman aqueduct, seem to form a bridge that beckons you to enter. Assisi, a city that reflects its Umbrian-Roman roots and medieval origins, is the ideal destination for pilgrimages. The sanctuary is an important meeting place for Christian spirituality, its identity unavoidably linked to the Franciscan Order and to the figure of the saint. Its remote roads, narrow and winding, asymmetrical and at times incredibly steep, allow whoever walks them to experience Francis’s time. Because the city houses a collection of masterpieces of human creative genius, Assisi is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, making the city a fundamental reference for art history in Europe and worldwide.
The son of a wealthy cloth merchant, Francis renounced all of his possessions and spent his life preaching throughout the regions of Lazio and Umbria.
Francis eventually received the isolated mountain of La Verna as a gift. The sanctuary Chiusi of La Verna that he founded there became his second home and was where, in September 1224, amidst the wings of a seraph, he received the Holy Stigmata. From that day to the present, a procession of monks crosses the sanctuary at the Ninth Hour (3pm) to pray in the Chapel of the Stigmata, in memory of this great miracle.
The Chapel of the Relics houses remnants of Francis’s walking stick and of his corded belt, a scourge, and a piece of cloth soaked in the blood of the saint. Inside, a hall built between 1578 and 1582 joins the Chapel of the Nativity with other internal chapels, including the invaluable Chapel of the Stigmata. Here, large frescoes depict moments in the life of St. Francis of Assisi, from the kiss of the leper until his death. The sacred places of the convent—the church of Santa Maria of the Angels, the basilica of Santa Maria Assunta, and the many chapels in their artistic beauty—all call one to worship and devotion, but the invitation to recollection and reflection can be felt in every corner, in every interior, and from every angle, and can inspire even non-believers. It is no coincidence that an inscription on a door of the convent reads “Non est in toto sanctior orbe mons,” or “There is no holier mountain in the world.”
The Franciscan order began to build its church in Assisi in 1228, two years after the death of Francis, to venerate and guard the body of the saint. It is the church of an order that preaches poverty and, in deference to its exalted founder more than to any doctrine, the “heroic” virtue of a life lived as a perfect Christian. The building aspires to narrate and to magnify the exemplary life of the saint. And if the memory of the saint is already the subject of popular worship, a pilgrimage to his tomb must be an act of active devotion, a step on the road to a true Christian life and to salvation.
Thanks to the generous alms of devotees and the support of princes and wealthy donors, the Franciscans were able to call to Assisi some of the period’s most renowned master architects, artisans, and painters, among them Simone Martini, Pietro Lorenzetti, Cimabue, and his pupil, the young Giotto.
The Basilica of San Francesco became a magnificent architectural complex that revolutionized and influenced, even to this day, the evolution of how to design and produce art in all 
its varied expressions, from painting to sculpture, from architecture to urban planning.
The Basilica is formed by two overlapping and independent churches. The lower church, which houses the remains of the saint, is a deep area, a large celestial crypt, the abode of precious treasures, that feels compressed in its effort to hold the wide pillars and large, low arches of the upper church, which by contrast is freer and more expansive as it extends upward toward God. Symbolically, the lower church represents the soil that contains the seed from which the plant of the Franciscan order springs. The space is as close and dark as the upper church is open and bright—a space that is not only vast, free, and clear, but that represents the earth and the heavens.
The brush of Giotto, which faithfully follows the narrative of the life of the saint, captures the imagination and moves one with its simplicity, free of doctrine and allegorical abstractions. Unlike most frescoes of the time, Giotto’s series in the lower basilica has neither biographical nor hagiographical meaning. Its aim, rather, is to outline the figure of a “modern” saint, a creator of a movement in triumphant expansion, whose driving impulse is the renewal of the Church.
Through his icons and images, Giotto manages to synthesize, with his great creative genius, the Christian message of the saint: simplicity, love for creatures and for God, and forgiveness as a way of restoring the harmony in which man can find peace and joy. His is an art that expresses everything—the divine and the human. It has been said, and rightly so, that in the Basilica “architecture and painting form an inseparable unity.” The cycle of Giotto in Assisi is one of the greatest masterpieces of the painter and of the history of western art, comparable only to Michelangelo’s masterpieces in the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
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