Saints and signal failure

Sadly it is our last day in Umbria. It was genuinely sad packing up and saying goodbye to everyone there. Ostello Bello Assisi is an absolute gem and if you want a great base from where to explore central Italy from we would highly recommend this place! See if you can spot our Polaroid on the wall when you’re there!

After packing the Panda and waving goodbye we headed out to finally go to Assisi. Third time lucky is the best way to describe it, this town was well worth the wait. After parking the car and taking the escalator up the hill to town, we started a walking tour from the Rick Steve’s book to get orientated with the place. I don’t think I could ever get sick of walking around the twisting cobbled streets of the Italian hill towns, they are simply beautiful.

Assisi is pretty famous for two reasons. St Francis of Assisi and St Clare. I guess it is pretty rare to have two of the saints in the Christian world in one town. They also both have amazing churches built in their honour. St Clare is buried in the Basilica of St. Clare, which was built by her

followers after she died as she didn’t want to have a flashy memorial. St Clare founded the Order of the Poor Clares after listening to the teachings of Francis and this is still going about 700 years later. This is an amazing Cathedral, which has Clare’s tomb and relics underneath, a pretty haunting place. Clare was a student of St Francis of Assisi. St Francis was a son of a wealthy merchant who had an episode and decided to start preaching a life without material positions. He also started preaching the bible in Italian, not Church Latin which was the practise at the time. This meant he gained a lot of followers. He is also the patron saint of animals which went down well with Crom.

The Basilica of St Francis is the dominant feature of town. It is huge. We decided to start with the lower floor as the guide in the book suggested, however there was a mass on. After watching for a few minutes as this is likely Crom’s first non funeral mass. It was all in Italian so we went to the upper level. Up here they have the frescos which described the life of St Francis to the illiterate medieval pilgrims. They were really impressive, however some parts are missing due to one of the many earthquakes they get in Italy. During the latest one, the mosaics fell off the roof and actually killed a priest and a few nuns. To preserve the art they had specialists put these back together, piece by piece but some parts were too damaged to be able to complete the frescoes as they once were.

After some lunch while waiting for mass to finish we went into the lower part of the basilica and went to see St Francis himself. It is a seriously impressive tomb with a lot of people lining up to pay respects. Funnily enough, they hid St Francis’ tomb in the structure of the crypt to prevent theft. When they decided to open it up to visitors it took a long time to find exactly where he was!

It was time to head back to the car and off to Florence to give back the Panda. This trip was pretty uneventful and we ended up on a really smooth road, which was a toll road. You need to pay for smooth roads here. After dropping Panda off without incident, we headed to the train station to get to Venice. This was supposed to be a two hour journey, however after spending 45 minutes in a tunnel and a long time at Bologna train station, we were about 129 minutes late, according to the train company. Not fun when there are no announcements to explain why you are late...but we are on holiday and have nowhere to be so it doesn’t really matter, apart from the late night getting into our hostel in Venice.