Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The Poverello, the little poor man who owned nothing, rests beneath one of the treasure houses of Western art, and the paradox would probably have made him laugh. Francis died on the evening of October 3, 1226, singing psalms on the bare earth outside Assisi; less than two years later Gregory IX canonized him and laid the first stone of this basilica the very next day. Two churches rose one upon the other on the Hill of Hell, renamed the Hill of Paradise: the dim Romanesque lower church wrapped around his tomb, and the soaring Gothic upper church where Giotto and his workshop painted the twenty-eight scenes of the Legend of Saint Francis that changed painting forever, joined by Cimabue, Simone Martini, and Pietro Lorenzetti. The saint's body, hidden so well in 1230 that it was lost, was found again only in 1818 and now lies in a stone crypt where pilgrims keep silence around a single burning lamp. On today's feast of Saint Francis, all of Assisi, and much of the world, turns toward this hill.