Assisi

The next day we went to Assisi, in the Apennine Mountains in Italy. It was very pretty. Assisi is most famous for St. Francis of Assisi, my confirmation saint, and the person who founded the Franciscan order of monks.

We arrived by train from Rome around noon. We then decided that we would walk up to our hotel.

Our hotel is somewhere on the right side of this picture. As you can see, Assisi is built on a hill. Walking up the hill took a while and was more difficult than we expected, but the views just about made it worthwhile.

When we got into the town itself, the streets were very narrow and everything was made of stone. It was similar to Les Baux, but while Les Baux seemed very much like a tourist attraction, Assisi felt more like a living town. There were cars that would drive up those tiny streets and then disappear into even tinier driveways.

Assisi had a ton of churches. Something like 30,000-50,000 people live here, but there are I think five basilicas, all about the size of St. Paul's Cathedral in Pittsburgh. It was pretty impressive. The most important basilica in Assisi is the Basilica di San Francesco (St. Francis).

It actually has TWO basilicas in one building. They are on top of each other.

This is the superior basilica. It had frescoes by Giotto all along the walls that depicted scenes from the life of St. Francis. They were pretty amazing.

This is the lower basilica. It has more frescoes by Giotto, but of various topics besides St. Francis, such as the Last Judgment. For some reason the pictures turned out much brighter than in reality. Both of the basilicas were darker than they seemed in these pictures.

The most amazing part of the entire trip, though, was this. The tomb of St. Francis. We spent a while down here sitting and praying. It was incredible to have a chance to see the grave of my confirmation saint.