We woke early so we could meet our tour at 7:40 am in the lobby of our hotel. We joined several other tourists on our bus, and headed out of Rome towards Assisi. While we were in Rome on our tour of the Palatine, we learned that tour guides need to have 3 years of experience and to pass a state test. Our guide, Maria Consuela, has been working for 10 years.
At our first rest stop, we met Barry and Sue, a couple originally from England and now living in Sidney, Australia. Barry and Sue were great fun. Barry has many colorful stories to tell and we are looking forward to getting to know them better over the next several days.
Maria has a lot of knowledge about the surrounding countryside, and regaled us with facts about olive oil and wine exporting (each small city in Tuscany has their own type of wine). She also gave us some background on St. Francis of Assisi, who was born into a wealthy family, and was a “playboy” before hearing the voice of God in a church and converting to a life of poverty and chastity.
Assisi is the home of the St. Francis Basilica, and the resting place of the Saint. It is an important pilgrimage location for devout Catholics, and one of the few areas we have been so far where there were actually more Italian tourists than foreign tourists (though I must say the Germans, Japanese and Americans are the most ubiquitous. While looking at the ground so you don’t trip on a cobblestone, you can tell each group by their socks and shoes without looking up.)
The Basilica is quite large, with three different stories. Franciscan monks and nuns roam about in significant numbers, with a surprising (at least to me) number of Asian monks. As you walk through, you see scattered about small glass-enclosed booths with a Franciscan monk inside, usually reading. It’s crowded in the Bascilica and can get noisy, so periodically a deep voice booms out over the crowd: “Shhh – Silenzio – shhh”. It sounds like the Voice of God, but is really the monks in the glass booth over the P.A.
The Bascilica is famous for two reasons: 1) it is one of the few examples of Gothic architecture in Italy (A good example of Gothic architecture is the Notre Dame in Paris – pictures to follow in about a week and a half! - and is characterized by large stained glass windows and vaulted ceilings.), and 2) The frescos painted by Giotto, which detail the life of St. Francis and which also ushered in a more realistic painting style after the Byzantine period. The buildings are painted in a true-to-life 3D way, and the faces of the people look like they are made out of porcelain. We were not allowed to take pictures inside the cathedral, but you can google all of the images.
On our way out, Eric and I sat down on a bench to let a large tour go by. We were able to look at the seats for the monks to sit during services, which were intricately detailed with carving and inlay, in a way that made the inlay look three-dimensional.
In Rome and also here in Assisi, we saw several beggars with clubfeet. Since clubfeet can be corrected fairly easily with surgery these days, it did make me wonder what the background of these beggars were, especially since many of them were not old.
Siena
Cheering crowds greeted us. I thought it was because of my great hat, but no, they were cheering a soccer game in progress. (Crowds of police were managing the crowds on the way back to the bus.)
Siena is famous for its ceramics, for which they invented the color “siena”. You can see it in the walls of the buildings and the tiles of the roofs. It is also famous for the Basilica of St. Catherine of Siena and the Piazza del Campo. Siena also has a square called the Piazza del Campo, where for approximately 200 years they have been having a famous horse race. Each neighborhood in Sienna has its own flag, and all of them have one representative in the race. The winner is allowed to display their flags in the Piazza del Campo and around the city hall for 6 months. (All of the flags for the different neighborhoods are in the Basilica.)
We paused to eat a snack at the Piazza, which looks like a dry lake bed. There were lots of attractively dressed Italians attending what may have been a Saturday evening wedding at the town hall in the Piazza del Campo.
On the way back to the bus, we paused to take a look around St. Catherine’s Basilica. St. Catherine’s body is in Rome, but her head, in a glass box on an altar, is in the church. Eric found it a little creepy. Personally, I didn’t find the head nearly as disturbing as I did the perfectly preserved, but exceptionally large, bronzed “finger” of St. Peter in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. At 8pm, we rolled into Florence, had dinner, and were off to bed for an early morning.
