Assisi

While our days have been packed with class and eating and naps (yes!), we have found plenty to do in the evenings, especially on weekends. On Thursdays there is live music at one of our favorite caffes, Caffe Cavour; recently we also discovered a bar that hosts jazz and blues on the weekends (I think we're going to blues night tonight). These are really great times, because it's often a smaller group of us, out in the local sphere of things, sharing a bottle or two of wine and relaxing. This Thursday, we went to our friend Hilary's place (she is a British student who is teaching English here as part of her university requirements, I think I've mentioned her before) so she could show us the place and have some white wine (Orvieto makes the best white wine I've tried; that I actually enjoy drinking some type of white is a constant marvel to me) before we headed over to Cavour. We found, on arrival, that it was karaoke night...we decided that it might be fun all the same, so we stayed. It was kind of fun, even if we had no idea what was going on. The two English songs that did come up we didn't even know, which was too bad because the microphones were immediately passed to us. I also spilled chianti all over my white jacket (thanks for making me take the Oxyclean, mom), so I'll need to visit the drycleaners to try and get the remainder out. Oh well. The last song played, though, was "One" by U2, which I sang. So that was fun.

Friday we drove out to Assisi in three vans to spend what has been one of my favorite days here so far. We first visited the tiny church of San Damiano, where St. Francis first heard the call from Christ to repair his Church. Mistaking it to mean the crumbling physical church he was in, St. Francis sold all the possessions he had at the time to fix it up. It was only after doing so that he realized that Jesus had spoken to him about the Church universal. After walking through it, we had a time of singing in an olive grove next to it. Our friend Alessandro had driven one of the vans, and he brought a guitar for playing English and Italian praise songs.

We then loaded up and drove into the mountains, to visit the small Franciscan monastery Eremo di Carceri. "Eremo" means "hermitage," and it is called this because the monastery is built into the side of the mountain around the grotti (caves) that St. Francis and his followers used for hermitage and meditations. It was a lovely, perfectly serene place in the middle of the woods, with trails cut into the hill. I walked around by myself for a while, cool in the midday under the shade of ancient, gnarled black trees. This set me in a contemplative mood that stayed with me for the rest of the day.

Lunch was in the sun on the side of the mountain outside of Carceri - hunks of fresh bread, a red and green tomato salsa, olives, olive oil, prosciutto, salami, apples, sweet bread...wonderful.

We loaded up and drove into Assisi proper, to walk down to the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi. I've been looking forward to seeing this for a long time, primarily because of the Giotto fresco cycle detailing the life of St. Francis. These are amazing, wonderful in their simplicity combined with their compelling arangement. However, I was completely unprepared for what lay beneath.

The Basilica is unusual because it consists of an upper and lower church; essentially, it is two full-fledged nave+transept+apse+side chapels stacked one on top of the other. You enter at the top, which contains the majority of Giotto's work (with a Cimabue thrown in), and then walk out the back to access stairs to the bottom church. This area completely astonished me. I'd been listening to Brooke Waggoner's song "Heal for the Honey" that morning, and in the climax of that song she sings "I'm undone, I'm undone, I'm undone." This phrase, in all the power and wistful beauty it contains in the song, instantly entered my head. The space was dark and vaulted, low and wide, and covered completely by paint, whether the ribs or the spaces in between. The altar was placed directly over the tomb of St. Francis, and there was an air of reverence all around. This only further increased when I descended into the crypt. Coming face to face with the bones of one of the largest figures in Christian history was inspiring and humbling. I spent some time in there praying, and then, since time was pressing, headed back outside. I wish I could have spent a lot more time there, and hopefully I'll be heading back at some point soon. I have never felt any place that was so consciously consecrated and serene as the hermitage and the Basilica. I felt spiritually drained and renewed at the end of the day.