My Italian Adventures by Lucy de Burgh

Author:Lucy de Burgh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750953061
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

19

A Journey of Discovery

C rossing the Tiber at the ancient Ponte Milvio, we branched right, up Route 3 for Florence, via Perugia. Our first stop was Assisi, where we left the main road to have a look at the town of St Francis. The Basilica is to me one of the wonders of the world. It consists of three churches, one above the other. The upper one is the largest and contains the magnificent Giotto mural paintings of the life of the Saint. The middle one is really the crypt and is covered in coloured frescoes, with brilliantly painted borders and patterns to each Gothic arch. One might be stepping between the pages of an illuminated manuscript of the fifteenth century.

Inside the crypt it was rather dark, but bands of sunlight shot shafts through the bright, stained-glass windows and lit up the rich reds, browns and yellows of the frescoed walls and ceiling. Then we descended a narrow, rough-hewn stone stairway and came to the tiny shrine containing the tomb of the Saint. Only the tomb itself was lit by a pinkish lamp. Everyone moved softly, almost on tiptoe, and a reverent hush pervaded the vault.

As we came up from the tomb and sallied forth into the quadrangle outside, the brilliance of the sun almost blinded us for a moment as it reflected dazzlingly from the blazing white stone of the church and the surrounding cloisters, and from the dry sandy floor of the courtyard. We decided that it was absolutely essential to find somewhere in the cool to eat our sandwiches and to ‘tidy up’, and so we began the search, driving slowly through narrow, deserted, shuttered streets and across an ancient square, an antiquated stone fountain at its centre, and back again. It was about two o’clock and there was not even a dog to be seen. The place seemed almost dead.

Finally, however, we came out on to a big open piazza, where a large church confronted us, Santa Chiara, we later discovered, and to our right lay a terrace from which a glorious panorama stretched for many miles. Assisi is at the end of a ridge, so that the view, right across the plain of Umbria, is unsurpassed. It must have been almost impregnable in the Middle Ages, when it carried on its feuds with neighbouring towns, Perugia and Arezzo, in particular. Its rock is visible from afar, and I later heard that the British prisoners of war, interned before the Italian armistice at Poppi, about 50 miles away as the crow flies, could see the rock of St Francis gleaming golden in the sunset every evening, almost like the burning bush seen by Moses.

After we had feasted our eyes on this panorama for a few moments, we turned our thoughts to more material matters and managed to find a ristorante that appeared to have no customers but whose doors were slightly ajar. We went in through a room with cloth-less tables and chairs reversed on top of each other and were ushered up a few steps to emerge round the corner into the kitchen.

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