On the Road with Francis of Assisi Read Free Page A

have come to know as a saint would have been disgusted by the money changing hands in his name. The Francis we know less well as a young man, however, would have welcomed the exchange and perhaps even profited from it.
    Francis was born into an emerging merchant class to a mother who is thought to have been French and a successful Assisi fabric merchant, Pietro di Bernadone. Pietro amassed a sizable fortune bringing home embroidered silks and velvets and damasks from France, fashioning them into stylish clothes in his workshop, and selling them to the nobles and affluent burghers of Assisi. Consumerism was taking hold in the late twelfth century, a trend that marked the accumulation of fancy clothes and dress for status, rather than simpler clothes for warmth and practicality. Pietro added more to his coffers by investing in land around Assisi, amassing so many farms, orchards, meadows, and forests that it is believed he was one of the hill town’s larger landowners.
    No one is absolutely sure where the Bernadone family lived in Assisi. Some historians believe they lived in a house known as the T.O.R. Casa Paterna near the Piazza del Comune. Others believe the family home was on the Vicolo Sup. San Antonio, also near the Piazza del Comune. The choice of that location is supported by the presence of a tiny, charming shrine with fading frescoes that has been called the Oratorio di San Francesco Piccolino since the thirteenth century and that, with unsubtle religious symbolism, bears a placard in Latin stating Francis was born here—in a stable.
    The most generally recognized location of the Bernadone home, however, and the one marked on tourist maps, is under the seventeenth-century Chiesa Nuova, just south of the Piazza del Comune. With some excitement we walk the short distance to the house from the oratorio but find its semiexcavated remains quite dull. There is archaeological value in the subterranean section of the ancient cobbled street on which the house fronted and the presumed remains of Pietro Bernadone’s shop where Francis worked for his father selling cloth. But we don’t sense any presence there of Francis.
    More interesting is the suggestion of a
porta del morto,
or “door of the dead,” in the house’s old vaulted brick-and-stone exterior wall. One of Assisi’s intriguing medieval trademarks, the small and elevated
porta del morto
is thought to have been opened only to transfer dead bodies outside, but it probably also had a more practical use, as a security measure. Most houses in Assisi had two entrances—one on the street level, which opened into the stable or whatever business the family was in, the other, higher, leading into the living quarters and reached by wooden steps that were taken up at night for safety. Quite a few houses in Assisi still have a
porta del morto,
though the “doors” have long since been either cobbled over or glassed in as windows.
    The only hint of Francis we find at the house he presumably lived in for the first twenty years or so of his life with at least one younger brother, Angelo, is the iron-barred
carceri
or cell displayed inside the Chiesa Nuova at ground level. It was in this “dark cellar,” according to the
Legend of the Three Companions,
that Pietro locked up his rebellious son for days on end to dissuade him from his spiritual conversion. But I’m getting ahead of the story.
    Pietro was away on one of his months-long buying trips to France when Francis was born. Francis’s mother, Lady Pica (whether she really was a noble “Lady” or even French has never been determined), took her son to be christened at either Santa Maria Maggiore, the first cathedral in Assisi, or the “new” cathedral, dedicated to San Rufino, Assisi’s patron saint, which was then under construction.
    I would like to think that Francis was baptized in the charming eleventh-century Santa Maria Maggiore, adjacent to the Bishop’s Palace on the equally charming, small, tree-lined