Assisi

Top things to do in Assisi

1. 01

   Basilica di San Francesco - Giotto's Life of Saint Francis over the tomb

   culture arts history 👍 Popular

   Two churches stacked on one another at the western end of town, begun in 1228 within two years of the saint's death on a hillside that had been the execution ground. The Upper Church is a single soaring Gothic nave lined with the twenty-eight scene cycle of the life of Francis long attributed to Giotto, the paintings that dragged European art out of flat Byzantine gold and into rooms with walls and weather; Cimabue's Crucifixion in the transept has oxidised into a strange photographic negative of itself. The Lower Church below is dim, low and heavily painted, with Simone Martini's chapel of Saint Martin and Pietro Lorenzetti's transept frescoes, and the crypt beneath holds the stone tomb, lost for centuries and dug out again in 1818. Shoulders and knees covered, no photography inside either church, and the basilica itself asks nothing at the door.

2. 02

   Basilica di Santa Chiara - the crucifix that spoke and the tomb of Clare

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   A banded pink and white church at the eastern end of the main street, propped over the valley on three enormous flying buttresses that are half the reason to walk round the outside. Clare, the noblewoman who slipped out of her family house to join Francis and then held her own order together for forty years, lies in the crypt. The chapel off the nave holds the twelfth century painted crucifix from San Damiano, the one that tradition says told Francis to go and repair the church, carried up here by the nuns when they moved inside the walls. The terrace in front is the best free view in town, straight down over the roofs to the plain.

3. 03

   Eremo delle Carceri - the hermitage in the holm oaks on Monte Subasio

   history nature wildlife hiking ⭐ Highly recommended

   Up in dense evergreen forest on the mountain above town, a cluster of tiny cells and chapels around the caves where Francis and his first companions went to be alone. A stone bridge crosses the dry torrent bed, a vast old holm oak leans over the path, and the rooms are so small that groups have to go through them in single file. Friars still live here and it stays quiet in a way nowhere else in Assisi manages. You can drive or take a seasonal bus, but the walk up from the top gate through the woods, roughly an hour of steady climbing, is the way to arrive.

4. 04

   San Damiano - the little church Francis rebuilt, down through the olives

   history scenic ⭐ Highly recommended

   Fifteen or twenty minutes below the walls on a lane through olive terraces, and the most affecting building in Assisi precisely because it is so plain. This is where the crucifix gave Francis his instruction, where he patched the walls with his own hands, and where Clare and her sisters lived for four decades in a bare dormitory with a garden terrace looking out at the valley. He is said to have composed the Canticle of the Creatures here, and the refectory still has its long tables. Take the path down from the eastern gate rather than driving; going on foot is the point.

5. 05

   Piazza del Comune and the Temple of Minerva - a Roman front doing church duty

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   The main square sits on the terrace of the Roman forum, and its centrepiece is a first century temple facade with six fluted Corinthian columns still standing exactly where they were raised, now the front door of a small baroque church. Goethe came to Assisi principally to see it and pointedly skipped the basilica. The medieval town hall, the tower of the people and the governor's palace close the other sides, the cafe tables fill the middle, and this is where the town gathers once the coaches have gone.

6. 06

   Cattedrale di San Rufino - the font where Francis and Clare were christened

   history culture arts

   The town's own cathedral, up a steep lane from the main square, with one of the finest Romanesque fronts in Umbria: three rose windows, and a lower band crawling with carved lions, griffins and grotesques. Inside, the font by the door is the one where both Francis and Clare were baptised, and by tradition the infant Frederick II as well. Underneath are the crypt of the earlier church and a Roman cistern built into the bell tower foundations, and the diocesan museum next door holds the detached frescoes.

7. 07

   Rocca Maggiore - the rampart walk above the rooftops

   history scenic

   The fortress on the crown of the hill, torn down by the townspeople in a revolt against imperial rule in 1198 and rebuilt for the papacy in the fourteenth century. The climb is steep and the interior is mostly bare stone, but you get a long vaulted passage, a keep to go up, and a narrow walled corridor running out to a round tower with arrow slits at eye height. The view is the payoff: the whole town beneath you in plan, the valley on one side and the bare top of Subasio on the other, with a second smaller fortress on the ridge opposite linked by the old walls.

8. 08

   Santa Maria degli Angeli - the Porziuncola standing inside a giant basilica

   history culture arts

   Down on the plain, an enormous domed church built in the late sixteenth century for no other reason than to shelter what is inside it: a tiny stone chapel, frescoed on the front, which Francis repaired with his own hands and where the Franciscan order effectively began. The effect of the small dark hut standing free under the great dome is genuinely odd and worth the trip down. Off the transept is the cell where he died in 1226, and behind it the rose garden of thornless roses with its frescoed chapel.

9. 09

   Monte Subasio and the Via di Francesco - walking straight out of town

   hiking nature wildlife scenic

   Assisi is the hinge of the long Franciscan walking route that runs down from the Tuscan mountain where Francis received the stigmata and on south towards Rome, so the town is used to people arriving on foot with packs. Above it the regional park climbs to a bald grassy summit pocked with shallow karst hollows, treeless and windy, looking across to the Apennines. Marked trails leave from the top gates and from the hermitage; the classic half day is up through the woods, out onto the open top and back down a different way. Bring water, because there is none up there.

10. 10

    Bosco di San Francesco - the woodland below the basilica

    nature wildlife culture arts

    A restored valley of woods, terraces and olive groves dropping away beneath the great church, held by the national trust and walked as a loop from a gate beside the lower piazza. It takes in a medieval hospital and church complex, a watermill, and at the bottom a huge earthwork of planted trees laid out as a land art piece in the shape of a reworked infinity symbol. Nobody much goes, which after the basilica is the appeal.

11. 11

    The Roman forum and the amphitheatre outline - the town under the town

    history

    Stairs off the street beside the main square drop into the paved Roman forum with its bases, inscriptions and the podium of the temple you were just standing next to, kept dark and largely to yourself. Over on the north east side of town, follow the street named for the amphitheatre and the medieval houses curve round in a perfect ellipse, built into the ring of an arena that has otherwise vanished, with a garden and washing lines where the sand would have been.

12. 12

    Chiesa Nuova and the Assisi of Francis before the sainthood

    history

    A small domed church built in the seventeenth century over what tradition holds was the house of Pietro di Bernardone, the cloth merchant father, including the cell where he is said to have locked his son up to talk him out of it. Around the corner is a stable-like niche kept as the birthplace. Nearby is the former cathedral by the bishop's palace, where the young man handed back his clothes along with his inheritance in front of the whole town, which is the moment everything else follows from.

13. 13

    The Umbrian table - torta al testo, strangozzi and Sagrantino

    food

    Umbrian cooking is the plainest and most carnivorous in central Italy: flatbread cooked on a hot stone and split open around cured pork or greens, hand-rolled strangozzi pasta with black truffle grated over it, pork and wild boar from the hills, lentils from the plain over the mountains, and everything finished with the region's own thick green olive oil pressed from the terraces below the walls. The reds worth drinking are grown a short way south, the tannic Sagrantino from around Montefalco above all. Eat away from the two basilicas and up the side lanes, where the kitchens cook for people who live here.

14. 14

    Assisi after the coaches leave - the walled town at night

    scenic culture arts

    The single best thing about staying overnight. From about five the day groups drain away, the lanes empty, and the town returns to a few thousand residents, a lot of friars and nuns, and whoever is sleeping inside the walls. Floodlights pick out the basilica and the fortress from below, the stepped alleys between the main street and the ramparts are lit and empty, and the terrace views over the valley pick up the lights of the plain towns. Walk it end to end and back; it takes under an hour.

Getting to & around Assisi

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