Visiting St Carlo Acutis in Assisi

1. Where the Tomb Is

The tomb of St Carlo Acutis is in Assisi, in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, which stands in the lower western part of the old town on the piazza of the same name. The Diocese of Assisi has given that church the title Shrine of the Renunciation, and Carlo's tomb occupies a side chapel inside it, at ground level, open to anyone who walks in. Assisi is a hill town in Umbria, in central Italy, and the shrine sits a few minutes downhill and west of the Basilica of St Francis, on the way toward the Porta San Pietro.

Pilgrims looking for the tomb often start at the wrong church. Assisi has two great basilicas at its two ends, San Francesco at the western edge and Santa Chiara at the eastern, and a cathedral, San Rufino, on the hill above the main square. Carlo is in none of them. Santa Maria Maggiore is smaller and plainer than all three, a Romanesque church with a bare stone facade, a rose window and a squat bell tower, easy to walk past. Look for the piazza named after it, between the Basilica of St Francis and the Porta San Pietro gate in the town walls.

The Shape of the Visit

What most people describe on arriving is how ordinary the setting is. There is no long approach and no monumental staircase. The building is old and quiet, the chapel is to one side, and the queue, when there is one, moves along a rail past the glass. The contrast between the scale of Carlo's reputation and the modesty of the church is the first thing that registers, and it is worth letting it register before anything else.

Beneath the church there is an archaeological area with Roman remains and traces of earlier building phases, and a room connected with the shrine displays material about Carlo's life and work. Santa Maria Maggiore is also a working parish church with a regular liturgical life, so a visit may coincide with Mass, confessions or the recitation of the Rosary. Pilgrims are welcome at all of them.

2. The Shrine of the Renunciation

The church is called the Shrine of the Renunciation, in Italian the Santuario della Spogliazione, because of what happened on the ground outside it around the year 1206. Francis of Assisi, then a young cloth merchant's son who had begun giving away his father's goods, was brought before Bishop Guido of Assisi by his father Pietro di Bernardone to settle the matter in the bishop's court. Francis answered by stripping off his clothes, handing them back, and saying that from then on he would call only God his father. The scene is one of the fixed points of the Franciscan story, and it is painted in the fresco cycle in the upper church of the Basilica of St Francis.

Santa Maria Maggiore is the church attached to that episode because it stood beside the bishop's residence and served as Assisi's cathedral before the title passed to San Rufino in the eleventh century. The piazza in front of it, and the bishop's palace beside it, are the setting of the renunciation. The diocese gave the church its shrine title in recent years, drawing the two stories together: a man who gave away everything he owned in that square, and a boy who gave away the years he did not get to keep.

Why Carlo Was Placed Here

The pairing is deliberate. Bishop Domenico Sorrentino, then bishop of Assisi, presented Carlo's burial in this church as an image of the same self-stripping in a different century: a teenager who had every ordinary advantage of a comfortable Milanese childhood and who spent his short life giving attention, time and skill to other people and to the Eucharist. The renunciation Francis made in public in 1206 and the ordinary generosity of a schoolboy who helped classmates and served at his parish are set side by side inside one building.

That framing matters for how a visitor reads the chapel. The shrine does not present Carlo as a curiosity or as a technological novelty. It presents him inside the oldest Franciscan story Assisi has, which is the story of letting go of what you own. Everything else in the town says the same thing in other forms: the bare stone of San Damiano, the small chapel of the Portiuncula inside its enormous later basilica, the tomb of Francis in the crypt of the basilica built over him.

The title Sanctuary of the Renunciation and the connection between the church, the bishop's palace and the renunciation scene are as published by the Diocese of Assisi, Nocera Umbra and Gualdo Tadino, which administers the shrine. The dating of the renunciation to around 1206 follows the standard Franciscan sources, principally the lives written by Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure, which do not give a precise day.

3. What You See at the Tomb

The tomb is a stone sarcophagus with a glass side, set low in its chapel, so a visitor walking past looks directly at the body lying inside. Carlo is dressed as he dressed in life: jeans, a track top over a shirt, trainers on his feet. His hands are folded. Behind and around the chapel there is usually a screen or display carrying photographs of him, along with reproductions of his handwriting and material from his catalogue of eucharistic miracles.

The clothing is what almost everyone remembers, and it is the point. Pilgrims are used to reliquaries in which a saint is dressed in a habit, a chasuble or the robes of an office, all of which say that the person belonged to a particular state of life. Carlo belonged to no state of life beyond being a Catholic schoolboy in Milan, and the shrine dresses him accordingly. The Church has canonised a person who wore what the people looking at him are wearing.

The Chapel Itself

The chapel is small. In quiet periods a visitor can stand at the glass for as long as they want. When the church is busy the flow is managed along a rail, and stewards ask people to keep moving, to stay silent and to put phones away in front of the tomb. Photography rules at the tomb are set by the shrine and are enforced by the people on duty, so follow what they say on the day rather than what a website told you in advance.

Around the chapel there are usually books for written petitions and a place to leave a card or a note. Many of the people in the queue are teenagers, often in school or parish groups, and the atmosphere is different from the hush of a cathedral crypt. It is closer to the atmosphere of a parish church at the end of a school Mass, which is probably the atmosphere Carlo would have recognised.

4. The Body, and What the Church Has Said

Reports about the state of the body are frequently wrong. The Diocese of Assisi has addressed the question directly. When Carlo's remains were examined and moved, they were found in the ordinary condition of a body buried for years. The body is not incorrupt, and the diocese has said so publicly. The face pilgrims see through the glass is a reconstruction in silicone, made from photographs, so that Carlo could be recognised by the people who come to pray at his tomb.

Bishop Sorrentino explained the decision in those terms: the intention was to let visitors see the boy rather than a sealed casket, and the diocese was explicit that no claim of miraculous preservation was being made. Reports and social media posts that describe the tomb as evidence of an incorrupt body are wrong, and correcting them is part of visiting the shrine honestly.

Why the Distinction Matters

Incorruption has never been a requirement for canonisation, and the Church has never treated it as proof of sanctity on its own. The processes that led to Carlo's beatification and canonisation examined his virtues, the testimony of the people who knew him, and two healings submitted as miracles, which were assessed by medical and theological consultors. None of that turned on the condition of his remains. Our guide to how the Church verifies miracles sets out the procedure in full.

Venerating the body of a saint rests on something plainer than preservation. Catholic teaching holds that the bodies of the faithful are destined for resurrection, and that the remains of the saints are treated with honour because those bodies were temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19) and will rise. A body in ordinary decay honoured behind glass says exactly what the faith says: this is mortal, and it will be raised.

The statements that the body is not incorrupt, that it was found in the normal state of decomposition, and that the face is a silicone reconstruction were made publicly by Bishop Domenico Sorrentino of Assisi and by the Diocese of Assisi, Nocera Umbra and Gualdo Tadino, which administers the shrine, at the time of the 2020 public veneration and repeated since. This page cites no independent examination of its own.

5. Why Assisi and Not Milan

Carlo Acutis was born in London on 3 May 1991 to Italian parents and grew up in Milan, where he went to school, served in his parish and built the websites he is known for. He died in Monza, near Milan, on 12 October 2006, of acute leukaemia, at the age of fifteen. His funeral was held in Milan. His grave, by his own request, is in Assisi.

His mother, Antonia Salzano, has said in many interviews that Carlo loved Assisi, spent holidays there with the family, and asked to be buried there because of his devotion to St Francis. He was buried in the municipal cemetery of Assisi after his death, and the tomb there became a place people visited long before any formal process reached its conclusion. Years later, as the cause advanced, his body was moved into the town, into the Shrine of the Renunciation, and it was opened to public veneration in October 2020 in the days around his beatification.

The Francis Connection

The affinity is easy to see once you know both stories. Francis was a rich merchant's son from a comfortable house in a prosperous town, who found the whole apparatus of his inherited life unnecessary. Carlo was the son of a well-off Milanese family who was famously indifferent to owning more than he needed, kept one pair of shoes when he could have had ten, and put his pocket money toward the poor of his own city. His remark that people are born as originals and many die as photocopies is a Milanese teenager's version of a very old Franciscan idea about not living someone else's life.

Milan has its own connection to him. He was baptised there, made his first communion there, went to daily Mass in its churches, and his cause was opened by the Archdiocese of Milan, which conducted the diocesan phase of the investigation. Pilgrims interested in the Milan side of the story visit the parishes he attended. The tomb, though, is in Umbria, and the reason is that he asked for it.

The full biography, his family background, his illness and the sayings he is remembered for are covered on our page about St Carlo Acutis, the millennial saint. This page stays on the shrine and the visit.

6. The Eucharistic Miracles Exhibition

The work that made Carlo Acutis known outside his own parish is a catalogue of reported eucharistic miracles that he researched and published on a website while he was still in his early teens. He gathered the cases, wrote them up with their locations, dates and the documentation attached to each, sourced photographs, and built the site himself. The project took him several years of ordinary after-school hours, and it was finished before he was fifteen.

That material was afterwards laid out as a panel exhibition, one case per board, which has travelled to parishes, schools and cathedrals across several continents, mostly carried by local volunteers who print the panels and set them up in a hall or a side aisle. Many Catholics have met Carlo first through those panels without knowing who assembled them. In Assisi the exhibition material is presented in connection with the shrine, so a visit to the tomb and a walk through the panels belong to the same stop.

What the Exhibition Actually Claims

The panels present each reported case with its history and the ecclesiastical judgements attached to it where those exist. Some of the cases are ancient and have centuries of local cult behind them, such as Lanciano in Italy and Santarem in Portugal. Others are modern and have been examined by diocesan commissions. The Church has never made belief in any particular eucharistic miracle a matter of faith. Catholic teaching holds that Christ is truly present in every validly consecrated Eucharist, whatever visible signs accompany it or fail to accompany it, and our guide to the Real Presence sets out that doctrine.

Reading the exhibition with that in mind protects a visitor from two mistakes. The first is treating the panels as a list of proofs, when the Church itself calls each of them a private matter of devotion. The second is dismissing the whole subject, when the cases have been documented, investigated and in several instances judged worthy of belief by the competent bishop. The exhibition is at its best understood as a boy's argument, made with the tools he had, that the doctrine at the centre of Catholic worship deserves attention.

The Marian Companion Project

Carlo also worked on a second catalogue, on reported Marian apparitions around the world, organised in the same way. That project is less widely circulated than the eucharistic one. For the Church's current framework for judging such reports, which changed substantially in 2024, see our guide to Marian apparition sites and what their approval means.

The description of the exhibition follows the material published by the exhibition's own organisers and by the Diocese of Assisi. This page gives no count of the cases catalogued and makes no claim about any individual case beyond noting that judgements on eucharistic miracles are made by the competent local bishop and are never binding on the faithful.

7. The Road to Canonisation

Carlo Acutis was canonised on 7 September 2025 by Pope Leo XIV in St Peter's Square, in the same ceremony in which Pier Giorgio Frassati was canonised. The path there followed the ordinary steps of a modern cause, and knowing them helps a visitor read the shrine and the dates carved into its displays.

Dates and steps above are those published in the acts of the Holy See and by the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, and reported by the Diocese of Assisi and the Archdiocese of Milan. The two healings are summarised here in general terms because the medical files are the property of the Dicastery and are not published in full.

The Postponed Date

The canonisation had originally been set for the spring of 2025, during the Jubilee, in connection with the gathering of teenagers in Rome. Pope Francis died on 21 April 2025 and the ceremony did not take place on that date. After the election of Pope Leo XIV, the canonisation was celebrated on 7 September 2025 with Frassati's. Pilgrims sometimes arrive in Assisi holding printed material with the earlier date on it, which is the reason it is worth stating plainly.

Two Young Men Together

Pairing Carlo with Pier Giorgio Frassati was a deliberate choice. Frassati was a Turin engineering student who died of poliomyelitis in 1925 at twenty-four, a mountaineer and a member of Catholic lay associations who spent his time and money on the poor of his city, and whose motto was verso l'alto, upward. Frassati was beatified by John Paul II in 1990. Two Italian laymen from opposite ends of the twentieth century, both dead before twenty-five, both remembered for the ordinary form their holiness took, were raised to the altars on the same morning. Our page on St Pier Giorgio Frassati tells his side.

8. Feast Day, Relics and Patronage

The feast of St Carlo Acutis falls on 12 October, the day of his death in 2006. Saints are ordinarily commemorated on the day they died, understood as the day of their birth into eternal life, and Carlo follows the rule. In Assisi the day is kept with particular solemnity at the shrine, and parishes and schools that have taken him as a patron keep it too.

Relics of Carlo have been distributed to churches in many countries since the beatification. Requests for relics go to the postulation and to the diocese, and they are granted according to the ordinary discipline of the Church, which forbids the sale of relics absolutely. Anything offered for sale online as a relic of Carlo Acutis should be treated as illegitimate on that basis alone.

Patron of the Internet?

Carlo is very widely described as the patron saint of the internet, of computer programmers or of young people online. That description is popular usage rather than a formal designation. Patronages become official when a competent authority grants them, usually on the petition of a diocese, an association or a country, and popular acclamation often runs years ahead of any such act. The honest way to put it is that Carlo is widely invoked by people who work and live online, and that this is where his reputation sits.

He is also widely called the first millennial saint, which is a way of saying that he is the first canonised saint born in the 1990s. Carlo was born on 3 May 1991, and the phrase follows from that date rather than from any act of the Church. Being first in that sense carries no theological weight. The Church has canonised teenagers before, including martyrs of the early centuries and, closer to Carlo's own time, young people known for ordinary devotion.

9. Praying at the Tomb

A visit to the tomb takes a few minutes at the glass, and it goes better with something to pray. Catholic practice at the tomb of a saint is asking for their intercession, which means asking the saint to pray to God for you, in the same way you would ask a friend to pray for you. The Church holds that the saints in glory are alive in Christ and pray for the Church on earth, which is what the communion of saints means, and our guide to the communion of saints sets it out.

What to Bring

Bring names. People arrive at Carlo's tomb carrying the names of children and grandchildren who have drifted from the faith, of teenagers in trouble, of the sick and particularly of the young sick, and of people whose lives are lived largely on a screen. Write them down before you travel, because standing at the glass with a queue behind you is not the moment to try to remember.

Bring a decision. The Franciscan pattern the shrine is built around is renunciation, and the pointed question the building asks is what you would put down. That question has a practical edge for a visitor whose phone is in their pocket. Carlo used the internet hard and used it for a purpose he chose. Deciding what your own use of it is for is an appropriate thing to settle in that chapel.

What to Do Afterwards

Go to Mass and to confession. Assisi is a town full of churches with priests available, and a pilgrimage that ends at a glass panel and goes no further has stopped short of what it was for. Carlo's own practice was daily Mass and frequent confession, and the sanest way to honour a saint is to imitate the thing he actually did rather than admire the story about him. If you are travelling with teenagers, this is where the visit becomes concrete for them.

If you cannot travel to Assisi at all, the Church has long recognised prayer and spiritual union with a shrine as real, and our guide to making a virtual pilgrimage explains what that does and does not amount to. Our guide to what a pilgrimage is covers the practice in general.

10. The Basilica of St Francis

The Basilica of St Francis stands at the western end of Assisi and holds the tomb of Francis himself. Construction began in 1228, immediately after his canonisation by Pope Gregory IX, on a hill outside the walls that had been used for executions and was renamed the Hill of Paradise. The building is two churches stacked on one another, the lower church of 1228 to 1230 and the upper church above it, with the crypt containing the tomb reached by stairs from the lower church.

The crypt is a nineteenth and twentieth century construction around a stone tomb that had been sealed and hidden for centuries. Francis was buried in the lower church in 1230 and the exact location was deliberately concealed, out of fear that his body would be stolen. Excavations rediscovered the tomb in 1818, and the crypt was built to make it accessible. Four of his early companions are buried around him.

The Frescoes

Both churches are covered in fresco cycles by painters working at the end of the thirteenth century and the start of the fourteenth. The upper church carries a cycle of twenty-eight scenes of the life of St Francis, traditionally attributed to Giotto, whose authorship art historians continue to debate. The upper church transept holds work by Cimabue, badly darkened by the oxidation of its lead-based pigments. The lower church holds the chapel of St Martin frescoed by Simone Martini and a Passion cycle by Pietro Lorenzetti. The renunciation scene described in section 2 of this guide is one of the panels in the upper church cycle, so a pilgrim can see the event and then walk down to the church where it happened.

On 26 September 1997 two earthquakes struck Umbria and sections of the vaulting in the upper church collapsed, killing four people who were inside assessing the damage from the first shock and destroying frescoes attributed to Cimabue and to the Master of St Francis. The restoration reassembled what could be reassembled from tens of thousands of fragments, and the upper church reopened in 1999. The basilica and the other Franciscan sites of Assisi were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2000.

The basilica is the friars' church, and it is a place of prayer before it is a monument. Silence is asked for throughout, photography is restricted inside, and shoulders and knees should be covered, which is true of every church in this section. The feast of St Francis is 4 October, and the town is at its fullest around it. Our page on St Francis of Assisi and the stigmata covers his life.

Dates for the construction, the 1818 rediscovery of the tomb, the 1997 earthquake damage and the 1999 reopening follow the published accounts of the Sacro Convento, the Franciscan community that holds the basilica, and the Italian Ministry of Culture. Attributions of the upper church cycle are contested in the art-historical literature, and this page reports the traditional attribution as traditional.

11. San Damiano

San Damiano is a small church and convent on the slope below Assisi, about a twenty minute walk downhill from the Porta Nuova gate through olive terraces. Two things happened there that shaped the whole Franciscan story. Around 1205 the young Francis, praying in the ruined chapel, heard a voice from the painted crucifix telling him to repair the house, which was falling into ruin. He took the instruction literally at first and rebuilt the walls with his own hands, begging stones in the town.

The second is Clare. In 1212 Clare of Assisi left her family's house to follow Francis, and San Damiano became the home of her community of Poor Ladies. She lived there for roughly forty years and died there in 1253. The convent preserves the small dormitory, the refectory with its long table, the tiny choir with its wooden stalls, and the garden terrace. Francis is also held to have composed the Canticle of the Creatures at San Damiano in 1225, when he was ill and nearly blind and Clare's sisters were caring for him.

What It Feels Like

San Damiano is the plainest of the Assisi sites and the one that pilgrims most often name as the one that stayed with them. The rooms are small, low and unrestored in feeling, the church seats perhaps a few dozen people, and the walk down and back up through the olive groves takes the visit out of the register of a monument tour. The crucifix hanging in the church is a copy. The original San Damiano crucifix, a painted twelfth century Umbrian cross, is in the Basilica of Santa Chiara in the town, where Clare's community took it when they moved.

The site is cared for by Franciscan friars and silence is asked for throughout, including in the cloister and the garden. Groups are usually asked to keep to the marked route. Our page on St Clare of Assisi and the Poor Clares covers her life and her order.

12. The Portiuncula

The Portiuncula is a tiny stone chapel that now stands inside an enormous baroque basilica on the plain below Assisi, in the town of Santa Maria degli Angeli near the railway station. The chapel is the cradle of the Franciscan order. Francis restored the ruined building with his own hands, and in 1209, hearing the gospel passage in which Christ sends out the disciples without money or spare clothing (Matthew 10:7-10) read at Mass there, he took it as the rule of his life. The first brothers gathered around him at that chapel, and Clare received the habit there in 1212.

Francis died beside the Portiuncula on the evening of 3 October 1226, in a cell that is now marked by the Chapel of the Transitus, a small structure a few steps from the chapel inside the same basilica. The huge church around them, the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, was begun in 1569 to shelter the chapel and to hold the crowds of pilgrims who came to it. A rough little chapel of unrendered stone stands whole in the middle of the nave, under a baroque dome, which is the sight the Portiuncula is remembered for.

The Pardon of Assisi

The Portiuncula is attached to an indulgence, known as the Pardon of Assisi or the Portiuncula Indulgence, traditionally traced to a grant made to Francis and confirmed by later popes, and now attached to 2 August and to certain other conditions. An indulgence is the remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins already forgiven, granted by the Church out of the treasury of the merits of Christ and the saints, and it requires the ordinary conditions of sacramental confession, Communion, prayer for the intentions of the Holy Father and freedom from attachment to sin (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1471). Pilgrims who want to gain it should read the current conditions published by the basilica rather than take them from any website.

One thing is worth saying plainly here, because a shrine, an indulgence and a paid product are sitting on the same page. The Church attaches nothing to a purchase. An indulgence has its own conditions, and they are sacramental: confession, Communion, prayer for the intentions of the Holy Father and freedom from attachment to sin. Pro is a set of audio devotionals, guided prayers and Bible studies, and buying it changes nothing about your standing before God, your pilgrimage or anything the Church grants. It is study material for people who want it.

Behind the basilica there is a rose garden connected with the story that Francis, tempted, threw himself into a briar patch which lost its thorns. Roses of the variety growing there are shown to visitors. The claim about the thorns is a Franciscan tradition and the basilica presents it as such.

The general conditions for a plenary indulgence summarised here are those set out in the Catechism of the Catholic Church 1471 to 1479 and in the Enchiridion Indulgentiarum of the Apostolic Penitentiary. The particular conditions attached to the Pardon of Assisi are published by the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli and by the Order of Friars Minor, and are the authoritative statement of them.

13. Santa Chiara and San Rufino

The Basilica of Santa Chiara sits at the eastern end of Assisi, a pink and white striped church with heavy flying buttresses on its flank, built between 1257 and 1265 to hold the body of St Clare, who died in 1253 and was canonised two years later. Her remains, rediscovered in the nineteenth century, lie in the crypt beneath the church, reached by stairs from the nave. The community of Poor Clares attached to the basilica keeps the office there, and a visitor may find the sisters singing behind a grille.

The basilica holds the original San Damiano crucifix, the cross from which Francis heard the words that started everything, displayed in the Chapel of San Giorgio off the nave. San Giorgio was the church where Francis was first buried before the basilica on the other side of town was ready, and where he had gone to school as a boy. Relics of Clare are shown nearby, including the habit she wore and pieces of her handiwork. Clare's feast is 11 August.

The Cathedral of San Rufino

San Rufino is the cathedral of Assisi, up the hill from the main square, with a Romanesque facade of three rose windows and carved portals. Both Francis and Clare were baptised at its font, which is shown inside the church, and Carlo Acutis's tomb lies in the building that held the cathedral title before San Rufino took it. Beneath the cathedral there is an archaeological area with Roman remains and the crypt of an earlier church. The cathedral museum holds the diocesan collection.

Putting the Day Together

Assisi is small enough to walk end to end in half an hour, though it is steep and the streets are cobbled, and the Portiuncula and San Damiano are both outside the walls. A common order runs from the Basilica of St Francis at the west end, down to Santa Maria Maggiore and the tomb of Carlo Acutis, along the main street through the Piazza del Comune, up to San Rufino, and on to Santa Chiara at the east end, with San Damiano added as a walk down from the Porta Nuova and the Portiuncula reached separately on the plain. Opening arrangements, Mass times and access to particular chapels are set by each church and change, so check them with the sanctuaries themselves as your travel dates approach.