On the Road with Francis of Assisi Read Free Page B

Piazza del Vescovado. The old cathedral’s simple stone Romanesque façade, with its one rose window, and the faded frescoes in its barrel-vaulted nave seem much more in keeping with the simplicity of Francis than the cavernous San Rufino, Assisi’s current cathedral, which took another hundred years to complete.
    Redone in the sixteenth century, San Rufino’s Gothic interior seems quite cheerless by comparison with the warmth of Santa Maria Maggiore. But whether Francis was baptized there or not, San Rufino would play a major role in the legend of Francis and Clare. A splendid pair of sculpted stone lions guard the doors to the cathedral, and during his conversion, Francis is said to have stood on top of the lions to preach to the incredulous people in the cathedral’s piazza. His makeshift pulpit would have been clearly visible from the house Clare grew up in, and perhaps the adolescent Clare first saw him from a window and was stirred by his message of peace and love—unlike the people who initially jeered at him and thought this son of Assisi had gone mad.
    Francis was certainly in San Rufino in later years. He would preach often in the cathedral, and he undoubtedly entered San Rufino, as we do, through a door in its original and splendid twelfth-century stone façade. He may also have walked on the cathedral’s original, uneven stone floor, a portion of which is visible beneath protective glass.
    But what tips the scales toward San Rufino as the site of Francis’s baptism is that just inside the entry, on the right, is the marble baptism font at which Francis was baptized, as was Clare eleven years later. Lady Pica had her son baptized Giovanni or John, after John the Baptist, but the name was short-lived. Pietro evidently did not want his son named after a desert saint, and when he returned from France, he changed his son’s name to the more businesslike Francesco or Francis, which means “the Frenchman.”
    Francis, by all accounts, was a wild and spoiled youth who cut quite a figure in Assisi. An indulged member of the nouveau riche, Francis always had a purse full of money, which he lavished on food and drink with his friends, and on stylish clothes for himself. According to the
Legend of the Three Companions,
“He would use only the finest materials and sometimes his vanity took an eccentric turn, and then he would insist on the richest cloth and the commonest being sewn together in the same garment.”
    Needless to say, there are no marked sites in Assisi that record the ne’er-do-well youth of Francis, save for the streets themselves, which he prowled late into the night with his friends, singing and carrying on and undoubtedly wenching in the spirit of the times. He wasn’t just part of the pack; he led it. “He was the admiration of all and strove to outdo the rest in the pomp of vainglory, in jokes, in strange doings, in idle and useless talk, in song, in soft and flowing garments,” writes Thomas of Celano. Francis agreed. In his Testament, written in the Bishop’s Palace in Assisi shortly before he died, he refers to the first twenty-five years of his life as a time “while I was in sin.”
    Francis received his rudimentary schooling in reading and writing Latin at the church of San Giorgio, over which the Basilica of St. Clare was constructed, just a few streets from his family home. Little remains of the old church except, perhaps, the back wall of the basilica’s glassed-in Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament.
    Francis was definitely not a Latin scholar. There are missteps in the two surviving letters in his own hand, which evidently made him sympathetic to the errors made by the better-educated friars who took his dictation. “And what is no less to be admired,” writes Celano, “when he had caused some letters of greeting or admonition to be written, he would not allow even a single letter or syllable to be deleted, even though they had often been placed there superfluously or in