Assisi Pilgrimage Sites and Basilicas

1. What Assisi Is

Assisi is a small walled town on the western slope of Monte Subasio, above the Umbrian plain, about twenty-five kilometres east of Perugia. It was a Roman municipium, and the temple of Minerva still standing in its main square is the clearest thing left of that period. Everything else that draws visitors comes from a stretch of roughly fifty years in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when a cloth merchant's son named Francesco di Pietro di Bernardone and a young noblewoman named Chiara di Favarone changed the shape of Western religious life from inside one small hill town.

The town reads as a single long ridge. At the western end, on a shelf of ground once used for executions and known as the Hill of Hell, stands the Basilica of St Francis, built after his death and renaming the site the Hill of Paradise. At the eastern end of the inhabited street stands the Basilica of Santa Chiara, pink and white, with three enormous buttresses on its southern flank. Between them sit the cathedral of San Rufino, the Piazza del Comune with the Roman temple, and a set of smaller churches attached to episodes in the Franciscan story. Below the walls, on the terraces of olive trees, is San Damiano. Four kilometres out on the flat plain, in a modern town of its own, is the basilica that houses the Portiuncula. Above the walls, in the woods, is the hermitage of the Carceri.

Two things make Assisi unusual among pilgrimage towns. The first is density. Two saints of the first rank are buried within a few hundred metres of each other, and almost every site connected with their lives survives in some recognisable form. The second is the art. The Basilica of St Francis carried one of the most ambitious painting commissions in Italy in the decades around 1300, and it holds work by Cimabue, Simone Martini, Pietro Lorenzetti and the circle of Giotto in a single building. A pilgrim and an art historian can walk the same route for entirely different reasons and both come away satisfied.

The lives themselves belong on their own pages. This guide covers the town: what each church holds, why the buildings are shaped the way they are, and what a pilgrim is actually looking at. For the life of Francis, from his conversion to the stigmata at La Verna, read our page on the life of St Francis of Assisi; for Clare, her flight from her family and the Privilege of Poverty, read the life of St Clare of Assisi.

2. The Sites at a Glance

Names overlap in Assisi and several objects have moved, so it is easy to look for a relic in the wrong church. The table below fixes the main ones. Everything in it is expanded later in the guide.

Assisi and its Franciscan sites were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2000 under the name "Assisi, the Basilica of San Francesco and Other Franciscan Sites". The inscription covers the Basilica of St Francis together with the Sacro Convento, Santa Chiara, San Rufino, San Damiano, the Eremo delle Carceri and Santa Maria degli Angeli.

3. The Basilica of St Francis: Two Churches in One

The Basilica of St Francis is two complete churches stacked vertically on the same footprint, with a friary, the Sacro Convento, built out from the hillside beneath and beside them. Pilgrims regularly walk through one and leave without realising the other exists, because they have separate entrances on separate piazzas at separate heights.

Francis died on 3 October 1226 and was canonised by Pope Gregory IX on 16 July 1228 at Assisi. The foundation stone of the basilica was laid the following day. The site was donated ground at the western edge of the town, and construction was directed by Brother Elias of Cortona, one of the most capable and most controversial figures of the early order. The lower church was finished quickly enough for the body of Francis to be brought there from its temporary grave at San Giorgio on 25 May 1230. The upper church followed, and the whole was consecrated in 1253 by Pope Innocent IV.

The Lower Church

The lower church is entered from the Piazza Inferiore through a doorway under a Gothic porch. Inside, the ceiling is low, the vaults are heavy, the light is thin, and the walls are painted from floor to rib. The building began as a single dark nave with a crypt beneath, and side chapels were cut into its flanks through the fourteenth century as noble families and cardinals paid for burial space. The effect is of a cave that has been decorated for six hundred years, and it is deliberate: the lower church is the funerary church, built to sit over a grave.

Walking it in order, the pilgrim passes the Chapel of St Catherine, the Chapel of St Martin frescoed by Simone Martini, the transept chapels, the stairs down to the tomb in the middle of the nave, and the Chapel of St Mary Magdalene. Over the papal altar is the vault with the allegorical scenes of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience together with the Glory of St Francis, painted by artists of Giotto's circle. In the right transept is Cimabue's Maestà, which includes the image of Francis that has shaped almost every later depiction of him: thin, small, bearded, with a mark under one eye and an ear that sticks out.

The Upper Church

The upper church is entered from the Piazza Superiore and it is a different world. A single tall nave of four bays runs to a polygonal apse, with large traceried windows carrying some of the oldest surviving stained glass in Italy. The architecture is French Gothic in its logic, imported and simplified, and after the darkness below the brightness comes as a shock. Where the lower church is dense and clotted with chapels, the upper church is one clear volume designed to be preached in and to be seen from end to end.

The painting is organised in registers. High up run scenes from the Old Testament on one side and the New Testament on the other. Below them, at eye level, runs the Legend of St Francis in twenty-eight scenes, the cycle that made the basilica famous and that fixed the visual story of Francis for the rest of Christian art: the cloak given to the poor knight, the crucifix speaking at San Damiano, the renunciation before the bishop, the dream of Innocent III, the sermon to the birds, the stigmata at La Verna, the death and the funeral.

4. The Tomb of St Francis

The tomb of St Francis is in a crypt below the lower church, reached by two staircases that meet in the middle of the lower nave and descend to a small chamber of bare stone. The stone sarcophagus stands above the altar, bound in iron, lit from below, and set into a rough masonry pillar. Four of his earliest companions, Brothers Leo, Angelo, Rufino and Masseo, are buried in the corners of the chamber. The Roman noblewoman Jacoba de Settesoli, whom Francis called Brother Jacoba and who came to him at his death, is also buried in the basilica.

Why the Tomb Was Hidden

When the body was brought up from San Giorgio in 1230, Brother Elias had it placed in a position nobody outside a small circle could locate, and the exact spot was then lost. The reason was theft. Relics of a newly canonised saint were valuable, and the neighbouring city of Perugia had a record of taking what it wanted from Assisi. Concealing the body was a security measure, and it worked for close to six centuries.

In 1818 Pope Pius VII authorised an excavation beneath the lower church. Friars dug at night over a period of weeks and found a stone tomb under the high altar containing a skeleton. The remains were examined and identified, and Pius VII confirmed the finding. A crypt in the neoclassical taste of the day was built to display the tomb, and between 1925 and 1932 it was stripped back and rebuilt in the plain stone the visitor sees now, which suits the subject better than the marble did.

What Praying There Is Like

The crypt is small, and it fills. Benches face the sarcophagus, a friar is usually present, and Mass is said at the altar under the tomb. Silence is asked for and mostly kept. The room takes about a minute to see and rewards an hour. What is in front of the pilgrim is the body of a man who owned nothing, arranged under a basilica that cost a fortune, and the tension between those two facts is worth sitting with rather than resolving quickly. Francis wrote his own view of possessions into the Rule and into his Testament, and the friars of the Sacro Convento have been arguing about the building over their heads since it went up.

That verse, with Luke 9:3 and Matthew 16:24, is one of the three texts the early sources say Francis and Bernard of Quintavalle opened at random in the church of San Nicolò in 1208 when they asked how they were to live. The tomb is the end of the road that began with those three passages.

5. The Frescoes and Who Painted Them

The Basilica of St Francis holds one of the most important concentrations of late medieval painting anywhere, and the attributions are genuinely contested. A pilgrim does not need the scholarship to pray there, and a visitor who wants to know what they are looking at should know that some of the labels are conclusions rather than facts.

The Legend of St Francis in the Upper Church

Twenty-eight scenes run around the lower walls of the upper nave, painted in the last years of the thirteenth century or the first years of the fourteenth. Tradition, going back to Ghiberti and Vasari, gives them to Giotto. Many art historians accept that; others hold that the cycle is by an unnamed painter or workshop, usually called the Master of the Legend of St Francis, whose style resembles Giotto's without being his. The argument turns on comparisons with the securely documented Giotto frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel at Padua. State the attribution as traditional and you will be accurate whichever way the scholarship eventually settles.

What the cycle did is beyond dispute. It took a man dead for seventy years and gave him a fixed and legible visual biography, in a public building, at the scale of a wall, in a style where figures have weight and stand in real space. Much later painting in Italy is downstream of these walls.

Cimabue

Cimabue painted in the transepts and apse of the upper church, including a very large Crucifixion. The lead white in his pigments has oxidised over the centuries and darkened, so the tonal values have inverted and the scene now reads something like a photographic negative: the highlights have gone dark and the shadows pale. The composition survives and the violence of it survives, and the damage is itself part of what makes the wall memorable. His Maestà in the lower church, with the four angels and St Francis at the right, is in far better condition.

Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti

Two Sienese masters worked in the lower church in the early fourteenth century. Simone Martini frescoed the Chapel of St Martin on the left of the nave with ten scenes from the life of St Martin of Tours, in a courtly, linear, brilliantly coloured manner that is the opposite of the weight and bulk of the Legend cycle upstairs. The chapel is one of the most complete decorative schemes of the period anywhere, windows and all.

Pietro Lorenzetti painted the left transept with a Passion cycle, including a Crucifixion crowded with horsemen and a Deposition of extraordinary restraint in which the body of Christ folds like cloth. In the same transept is his Madonna and Child with St Francis and St John, known as the Madonna dei Tramonti, the Madonna of the Sunsets, because of the hour when the light reaches it.

6. The 1997 Earthquake and What Was Lost

On 26 September 1997 two earthquakes struck the Umbria and Marche region within hours of each other. During the second shock, part of the vault of the upper church of the Basilica of St Francis collapsed while an inspection party was inside assessing the damage from the first. Four people were killed: two Franciscan friars and two technicians from the state heritage office.

The falling vault destroyed frescoed sections outright, including a figure of St Matthew by Cimabue and a St Jerome from the circle of Giotto, which came down as tens of thousands of fragments. The basilica was closed, the building stabilised, and the fragments recovered, sorted and in part reassembled in a fresco conservation operation of exceptional scale. The upper church reopened to the public in November 1999. Some of what fell has been put back. Some of it is gone.

The episode is worth knowing before a visit for two reasons. It explains patches of blank or reconstructed plaster overhead in an otherwise complete scheme, and it explains the seriousness with which the friars now handle crowds, noise and structural work. It also puts the whole basilica in proportion. The building has stood for eight centuries on a hillside in a seismic country, and it has been repaired, propped and re-anchored repeatedly over that time.

7. The Basilica of Santa Chiara

The Basilica of Santa Chiara holds the body of St Clare of Assisi and stands at the eastern end of the town on a terrace above the plain. The exterior is unmistakable: courses of pink and white limestone quarried from Monte Subasio, a plain gabled front with a large rose window, and three colossal arched buttresses striding across the piazza on the southern side, added later to hold the building against the slope.

Clare died on 11 August 1253, two days after Pope Innocent IV confirmed her Rule, and she was canonised by Pope Alexander IV in 1255. Building on the basilica began in 1257 and it was consecrated in 1265. The site was already Franciscan ground: it held the church of San Giorgio, where Francis had gone to school as a boy, where his body had lain from 1226 until the translation of 1230, and where he had been canonised. San Giorgio was absorbed into the new basilica, and the part of it that survives is now the Chapel of the Crucifix.

The Crypt and the Body of St Clare

Clare's tomb followed the same pattern as Francis's. Her body was buried under the high altar and the location dropped out of common knowledge. It was located again in an excavation in 1850, and a crypt was constructed to receive it, later remodelled in a plainer style in the 1930s. What the pilgrim sees today is a recumbent figure in a black habit behind glass, and honesty requires saying that the visible face and hands are a wax covering made over her remains. The bones are hers. The face is not a preserved face.

The Relic Chapel

Off the crypt is a room of relics that repays slow looking, because it holds ordinary objects from two extraordinary lives. Among them are Clare's tunic and mantle, the hair shorn from her head at the Portiuncula when she took the habit, a small breviary, and items associated with Francis including a tunic and one of his few surviving written pieces. The cloth is coarse, patched, and small. It settles the question of what Franciscan poverty actually looked like better than any book on the subject.

The Poor Clares Today

An enclosed community of Poor Clares still lives in the monastery attached to the basilica and prays the Liturgy of the Hours in choir behind a grille. Pilgrims can attend. Clare's own foundation continues in unbroken line on the same hill, which is a stronger argument for the durability of her form of life than any of the architecture around it.

8. The San Damiano Crucifix

The San Damiano crucifix hangs in the Chapel of the Crucifix inside the Basilica of Santa Chiara. Pilgrims who go looking for it at San Damiano find a copy, hung where the original once was, and the disappointment is avoidable with a sentence of warning. The Poor Clares carried the cross with them when they left San Damiano for the new monastery beside San Giorgio inside the walls, and it has remained in their keeping ever since.

The cross itself is a painted panel of the Romanesque type made in Umbria in the twelfth century, large, with the figure of Christ open-eyed and upright against a red ground, surrounded by small figures of the witnesses at the crucifixion: Mary, John, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, the centurion, the soldiers with the lance and the sponge. Christ is shown alive and reigning from the cross rather than slumped in death, which is the standard Byzantine-influenced iconography of the period and which explains the calm face that surprises people used to later Western crucifixes.

What Francis Heard

Around 1205 or 1206, according to the early Franciscan sources, Francis was praying before this cross in the ruined church of San Damiano when he heard a voice telling him to go and repair the house of the Lord, which was falling into ruin. He took it literally, sold cloth from his father's warehouse to pay for building materials, and set about rebuilding the walls of San Damiano with his own hands. He went on to repair San Pietro and the Portiuncula. The wider meaning, that the house to be repaired was the Church, is the reading the sources and the tradition give it afterwards.

The sale of his father's cloth is what produced the confrontation in front of Bishop Guido, and that scene is why the church of Santa Maria Maggiore now carries the name Sanctuary of the Renunciation. The events at the cross, in the bishop's court, and at the Portiuncula are three links in one chain, and they happened within a few years and within a couple of kilometres.

9. San Damiano Below the Walls

San Damiano is a small church and monastery on the hillside below the southern walls of Assisi, reached by a lane and then a footpath that drops through olive terraces from the Porta Nuova. Of the Franciscan sites it is among the least changed, and it is the place where the ordinary conditions of Francis's and Clare's lives are easiest to picture.

The church was a neglected chapel when Francis found it. He rebuilt it with stones he begged and carried, and in 1212, after Clare left her family's house and received the habit at the Portiuncula, Francis installed her and her first companions there. Clare lived at San Damiano for forty-two years and died there on 11 August 1253. She never moved again, and she governed the community, wrote her letters to Agnes of Prague, and fought for the right to own nothing, from inside those walls.

What Survives

The buildings are small, low, whitewashed and rough. The visit takes in the church with its copy of the crucifix, the choir with plain wooden stalls worn smooth, the dormitory where the sisters slept on the floor and where a cross marks the place Clare died, the refectory with its long tables and the small crosses cut where each sister sat, and the little garden terrace above the valley. The oratory of St Clare holds a painted cross and a niche where the community kept the Eucharist.

In the garden at San Damiano, in 1225, blind and in pain, Francis composed the Canticle of the Creatures, one of the earliest surviving poems in the Italian vernacular, praising God through Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire and Sister Mother Earth, and later adding the verses on forgiveness and on Sister Bodily Death. He wrote it as a song and taught the brothers to sing it. Standing in that garden with the Umbrian plain below is the closest thing Assisi offers to being inside the text.

San Damiano is now cared for by Friars Minor, and it is quiet in a way the basilica cannot be. Take it slowly, and take it in the morning if the day is going to be hot, because the climb back up to the Porta Nuova is steady and the path is exposed.

10. The Portiuncula Inside Santa Maria degli Angeli

The Portiuncula, spelled Porziuncola in Italian, is a small stone chapel dedicated to Saint Mary of the Angels that stands complete under the dome of a very large basilica on the plain four kilometres below Assisi. The name means "little portion", from the small parcel of land it sat on. Seeing a whole medieval chapel with its own roof, doorway and frescoed gable standing free inside a baroque nave is disorienting for a moment and then makes perfect sense: the basilica was built as a shelter.

The chapel belonged to the Benedictines of Monte Subasio, who let Francis have the use of it for a token rent. He repaired it as he had repaired San Damiano, and it became the centre of the brotherhood. Three things happened there that shaped the order.

The Gospel That Became the Rule

In 1208, hearing the gospel read at Mass in the chapel, Francis took the sending of the disciples in Matthew 10 as a direct instruction: to preach the kingdom, to carry no gold or silver, no bag, no second tunic and no sandals. He stripped off what the passage named and adopted the life it described. Everything the Franciscan movement became follows from that morning in that room.

Clare Receives the Habit

On the night of Palm Sunday in 1211 or 1212, Clare left her family's house in Assisi, came down to the Portiuncula, and there had her hair cut off and received a rough habit from the brothers. The Poor Clares date their beginning from that night, and the hair is in the relic chapel at Santa Chiara.

The Transitus

Francis died on the evening of 3 October 1226 in the infirmary hut beside the chapel, having asked to be carried back to the Portiuncula and laid on the bare ground. The Cappella del Transito, a small chapel inside the same basilica a short distance from the Porziuncola, stands on that spot and holds a statue of him. Franciscans keep the Transitus each year on the evening of 3 October with a service of readings and psalms, and the feast of St Francis follows on 4 October.

The Basilica Around It

Construction of the enclosing basilica began in 1569 under Pope Pius V to a design by Galeazzo Alessi and was completed in 1679. An earthquake in 1832 brought down the nave and aisles, which were rebuilt in the following decade, while the dome and the chapel beneath it survived. The present front, with its gilded statue of Our Lady of the Angels on top, was completed around 1930. Also inside the complex are the rose garden, where a tradition holds that Francis threw himself into a briar patch and the thorns fell from the roses, the small Cappella del Roseto frescoed by Tiberio d'Assisi, and a museum.

11. The Pardon of Assisi

The Pardon of Assisi is a plenary indulgence attached to the Portiuncula and traditionally gained on 2 August, and it is the reason a great many Italian pilgrims come to Santa Maria degli Angeli rather than to the tomb. Franciscan tradition holds that Francis asked Pope Honorius III for it around 1216 and that the pope granted it orally at Perugia. Later popes confirmed and extended it, and it now applies to Franciscan churches and to parish churches under the usual conditions.

An indulgence in Catholic teaching is the remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, and it is granted by the Church out of the treasury of the merits of Christ and the saints. The conditions are the ordinary ones for any plenary indulgence: sacramental confession, Holy Communion, prayer for the intentions of the Holy Father, and a complete detachment from all sin, including venial sin. The visit itself involves entering the church and praying the Our Father and the Creed.

Two clarifications worth making, because both are widely misunderstood. An indulgence does not forgive sin. Forgiveness of guilt comes through sacramental confession, and the indulgence addresses what remains after that. And an indulgence is never bought. The abuse of selling them was one of the immediate triggers of the Reformation in 1517 and the Church has forbidden any charge in connection with them since the sixteenth century.

The definition of an indulgence given here follows the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 1471 to 1479, and the current discipline is set out in the Church's Manual of Indulgences. The specific conditions and the days on which the Portiuncula indulgence can be gained are set by the Church and by the sanctuary, and pilgrims should confirm them with the friars rather than with any third-party description.

12. The Eremo delle Carceri

The Eremo delle Carceri is a hermitage in the woods on the flank of Monte Subasio, several kilometres above Assisi by a steep road that leaves the town at the Porta Cappuccini. The name means "the hermitage of the prisons", using the word in the older sense of places of enclosure or seclusion. Francis and his companions came up here to pray in a set of natural caves in the limestone, coming down to preach and returning to the silence.

The site is small. In the fifteenth century St Bernardine of Siena built the little convent and church that now stand at the entrance, and everything beyond them is rock, oak wood and footpath. The visit takes in the tiny choir, the chapel, a narrow stair down to the grotto where Francis slept with a bare slab of stone for a bed, a stone bridge over a torrent bed that has long been dry and that Franciscan tradition connects to a command of Francis, and paths that run out into the woods past other caves used by the first companions.

The value of the Carceri is the contrast. Assisi below is a town of basilicas, guided groups and shops selling tau crosses. The Carceri is a wood on a mountain with a crack in the rock at the bottom of a stair, and it is closer than anything else in Assisi to the physical conditions Francis actually chose. Anyone trying to understand why a man who founded a rapidly growing order kept withdrawing from it should go up.

The walk up from the Porta Cappuccini takes well over an hour on a steady climb, on road and on marked path through the regional park of Monte Subasio, and it is fine walking. Going up on foot and coming back down on foot is a full half day. Hikers continue over the top of Subasio; the summit ridge is open grassland with the whole Umbrian valley on one side.

13. San Rufino and the Churches of the Town

The cathedral of San Rufino is the parish church of Assisi and the place where both saints were baptised, and a surprising number of pilgrims walk past it. It stands up a steep lane from the Piazza del Comune on its own quiet square. St Rufinus, according to local tradition an early bishop martyred in the third century, is buried in the crypt in a Roman sarcophagus reused for the purpose.

The Font

Just inside the door, on the right, is the font. Francis was baptised there in 1181 or 1182, Clare about a dozen years later, and local tradition adds the Emperor Frederick II, who spent part of his infancy in Assisi. Two people who reshaped Western Christianity were made Christians at the same stone basin within one generation in one small hill town. A pilgrim can put a hand on it. Of all the objects in Assisi, that font is the one most likely to catch someone off guard.

The Facade and the Interior

The Romanesque front of San Rufino, begun in the middle of the twelfth century, is one of the best in Umbria: three doorways, three rose windows, carved lions, griffins and interlace, and a squat bell tower beside it standing on Roman foundations. The interior was remodelled in 1571 by Galeazzo Alessi and is calmer than the front leads you to expect. Francis preached here, Clare's family worshipped here, and the archaeological area under the church shows the Roman structures the cathedral was built over.

The Sanctuary of the Renunciation

The church of Santa Maria Maggiore, in the lower town, was Assisi's cathedral before San Rufino took the title. It is now called the Sanctuary of the Renunciation, after the scene in the bishop's court outside it in which Francis handed his clothes back to his father and said that from then on he would call God alone his father. The church holds the tomb of St Carlo Acutis, the teenager who died in 2006 and was canonised in 2025, and it has become the reason a much younger crowd now walks Assisi. We cover that church and the tomb separately in our guide to visiting St Carlo Acutis in Assisi, and his life is on our page for St Carlo Acutis.

Chiesa Nuova, Santo Stefano and Santa Maria sopra Minerva

The Chiesa Nuova, a few steps off the Piazza del Comune, was built in 1615 at the expense of King Philip III of Spain over the house held by tradition to be the family home of Pietro di Bernardone, and it preserves a small windowless room shown as the storeroom in which Francis's father shut him up. Santo Stefano, in a lane below, is a plain twelfth-century church whose bells, according to Assisi tradition, rang by themselves at the hour of Francis's death. Santa Maria sopra Minerva is the church occupying the first-century BC Roman temple front on the main square, six Corinthian columns and a flight of steps, admired by Goethe when he passed through in 1786, who looked at the temple and walked past the Basilica of St Francis without going in, which says something about the taste of the period. The Benedictine abbey church of San Pietro, near the gate of the same name, is a fine austere Romanesque building with almost nobody in it.

14. Rivotorto and the Valley Floor

Rivotorto is a sanctuary on the plain between Assisi and Santa Maria degli Angeli, built around the site where the first brothers lived before the Portiuncula became their base. The early sources describe an abandoned hovel, the tugurio, where Francis and his first companions slept in about 1208 and 1209, in conditions so cramped that Francis chalked names on the beams to mark where each brother could lie down. A peasant eventually drove them out by bringing his donkey in.

The present church is neo-Gothic, built after an earthquake destroyed its predecessor in 1854, and inside it stands a reconstruction in stone of the huts. The reconstruction is exactly that, and the sanctuary does not pretend otherwise. It is worth the stop for the scale of the thing. The two rooms are the size of a garden shed, and the order that came out of them had spread across Europe within Francis's own lifetime.

How the Valley Fits Together

Understanding Assisi means seeing that the story runs up and down the hill rather than staying inside the walls. The town on the ridge holds the birth, the baptism, the renunciation and the two tombs. The slope below the southern wall holds San Damiano. The plain holds the Portiuncula, the death, and Rivotorto. The mountain above holds the caves. Francis spent his life moving between those levels on foot, several times a week, and a pilgrim who takes at least a couple of those journeys on foot rather than by road understands the geography of his life in a way that no amount of reading supplies.

Assisi also sits inside a wider Umbrian and Italian circuit, and pilgrims often combine it with Cascia, Loreto, Lanciano or Rome. Our guide to the pilgrimage sites of Italy sets out how these fit into a route, and the pilgrimage sites of Rome covers the other end of the usual Italian itinerary.

15. Walking the Sites in Order

Assisi rewards an order that follows the life rather than the map, and the two are close enough to combine. What follows is a sequence rather than a schedule, and it says nothing about opening times, tickets or transport, all of which change and none of which this page will tell you.

A Sequence That Follows the Story

• San Rufino. Start at the font, where both saints became Christians. Everything else follows from it.
• Chiesa Nuova. The family house and the locked room, two minutes from the main square.
• The Sanctuary of the Renunciation. The bishop's court, the stripping, and now the tomb of Carlo Acutis.
• San Damiano. Down through the olives. The voice from the cross, Clare's forty-two years, and the Canticle in the garden.
• Santa Maria degli Angeli. Out on the plain. The Portiuncula, the gospel of Matthew 10, Clare's habit, and the Transito where Francis died.
• The Eremo delle Carceri. Up the mountain, for the silence he kept going back to.
• The Basilica of Santa Chiara. The original San Damiano crucifix in the chapel, the relics, and Clare's body in the crypt.
• The Basilica of St Francis. Last. Lower church, upper church, then down to the tomb.

Finishing at the tomb rather than starting there is worth arranging. Arriving at the crypt on day one, cold, having seen nothing else, produces a photograph. Arriving at it after San Damiano, the Portiuncula and the Carceri produces something else, because by then the man in the stone box has a house, a wood, a garden and a chapel attached to him.

Practical Notes That Do Not Rot

The town is stone and steep, and every route involves gradient. Shoulders and knees covered is the norm for entering the churches, and the friars enforce it. The Basilica of St Francis asks for silence and restricts photography. San Damiano and the Carceri are quiet places that groups can fill quickly, so early is better than late for both. And the enclosed communities, the Poor Clares at Santa Chiara among them, pray the Hours in choir throughout the day, which pilgrims are welcome to join and which is the most Franciscan thing available in the town.

If you cannot travel, the sites can still be prayed. Our guide to making a virtual pilgrimage covers how the Church understands a pilgrimage made from home, and what a pilgrimage is sets out the practice itself.

16. Frequently Asked Questions