Tuscany 2. Assisi

Tuscany 2.  Assisi

the gate through which we entered Assisi 

yes, very helpful

Via Frate Elia

Via Georgetti

All of these towns have changed since we first came here in the way they handle tourists. That was in 1990, not long after a serious earthquake which had damaged the main cathedral here quite badly. There are so many more visitors these days that the days of driving up and parking on a bit of waste ground next to the city walls are long gone. Indeed many of the places we visit on this trip allow no traffic other than service vehicles and taxis into the old parts of town. Assisi is certainly no exception and we had to park in an underground multi-storey car park outside the city walls and get a taxi in to our accommodation. It wasn’t far but was steeply uphill and we would be wheeling suitcases.

everybody tries the combination - and fails

We’re in an old town house with a keypad lock which we can’t open. The instructions have been written by someone who knows which button to press first or last and has assumed that everyone else also knows. When the woman in charge turns up there are no apologies or helpful noises just a look from someone who appears to have sucked a lemon for breakfast. We struggle up vertiginous stairs to a kitchen and then to our top floor bedroom. Bonnie and Newt are on the floor below us and due to a faulty latch, immediately get locked in their room. Assisi is growing on us. Following the lead of my old friend Bill who I think I remember saying that the first thing he does when checking into a hotel is to check the fire escape, I confirm that there are as many fire escapes as there are saucepans in the ‘kitchen’ - none. However, I see that by going through a small door into a loft space, it would be very easy to climb through a window onto a flattish roof and over some low railings to a garden. Sorted. It’s a measure of how steep the town’s topography is, that a third storey in our house leads on a level course to a garden in the street behind us. There are no fire alarms, extinguishers, smoke detectors or anything else relevant but the fact that I’m writing this means that we did get out alive.

Cathedral of St Francis as the mist begins to clear 

Early the next morning it was misty with the sun shining through it, ethereal drifts of mist wafted about and it looked glorious with white stone almost glowing and faint echos of buildings just visible as ghostly outlines. The unromantic eager sun soon burnt it off and we went exploring. First we walked all the way up to the NE end of the town which is the highest part of a city which slopes down from the NE towards the SW. The fact that it isn’t flat adds to the attraction and the main distant views are south and west over the valley of the River Chiascio and River Tevere.  I'd never heard of them either.  

looking west from the edge of the city

the same direction about 7 hours later

At that NE corner, just inside the city wall is where a modest sized Roman Amphitheatre stood, now it just consists of houses and gardens but with the original shape still very obvious.  The northern edge of the town looked over a dramatic valley and open countryside but we turned back through the town gate and made our way slowly back down. It is a very attractive city and we could easily stay here longer. The place is full of interesting looking nooks and crannies, alleys and narrow streets which are so constricted there are special buses only three seats wide which squeeze their way through, sometimes past cafe tables edging out into the road. There are many fine churches to find unexpectedly round an odd corner, one with the stoutest flying buttresses I’ve ever seen.

the re-purposed amphitheatre

Monkey Orchid just outside the NE gate

looking off to the N of the city

one of those narrow buses

As I foresaw in my previous blog, there are lots of the faithful wandering about, men in long brown habits, small collections of Mother Theresa lookalikes and as a terrible generalisation, groups of people looking faintly at a loss and dressed in beige. On the Piazza San Francisco, next to the cathedral is a very large screen and many rows of chairs, presumably all set for the Canonisation which has been postponed. I am presuming that you all know that this is the Cathedral for St Francis of Assisi, who by the way was born twelve years after Thomas Becket was murdered in Canterbury. The ‘a’ in Thomas a Becket was added later. The cathedral is huge and beautiful with an upper and a lower basilica which really are one above the other just like a huge two storey building. To me it had a feel of Muslim and Greek Orthodox about it which I put down to the lavish blue and gold decorations. As you would imagine, it was full of visitors and to my surprise free to get in, unlike the ice cream in the town which was hellishly expensive. Silence was the order of the day in the cathedral and a man stood inside the entrance, every now and then when the mumbling got too loud for him, he would announce tonelessly “silencio, shhhhhh”. Perhaps just once in a while when it all got too much he might crack and shout “shaddup you face” but alas not when we were there.

spare anything for a cup of coffee ?

the upper floor of the Cathedral of St Francis

28-30 April 2025