Assisi | The Church He Would Have Chosen
The one Umbrian town everyone can name.
Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay to keep us on the road.
We parked without trouble. I’ve had some horror stories in mountain-top villages and towns, also known as the Italian parking situation, but Assisi was a smooth experience. This is the most famous pilgrimage town in Italy, and we even visited this town during the 800th anniversary of the death of Saint Francis, but more on that later. And in the middle of April, on a weekday, we drove up from the valley, found a space, walked in through the gate, and were standing under the basilica inside ten minutes. I have spent longer circling San Gimignano in May. We had come over from Lake Trasimeno, where we were staying, and we had friends waiting in Perugia for dinner that evening, so the afternoon was ours.
Assisi is in Umbria and Umbria is a region most people drive past on the way to somewhere with a coastline. No sea, no Renaissance, no big capital. The hills are steep enough that walking around any of its towns counts as a day’s exercise, and every neighbor outranks it in the tourist imagination: Tuscany has the art, Lazio has Rome, and Marche has spent the last five years being everybody’s newly discovered stretch of beach. Umbria has forests, valleys, and a handful of stone towns on hilltops that nobody outside Italy could place on a map. This is a large part of why I like it. And then there is the one word, and the whole world thinks of one thing: Assisi.
Whatever you think about Assisi or what it represents, we can’t start writing about it without Saint Francis of Assisi. And we can’t write about Saint Francis of Assisi without writing about faith and religion. Since this article is written in 2026, and during these days everyone is hyper-sensitive about topics like religion, I strongly recommend one thing if you want to read this article: an open mind.
With that said, let’s start with my POV on religion and faith. In short: I have faith, but I don’t have a religion, or at least, not in a clear-cut way. Let me explain. Faith is hard. It demands that you do things that are uncomfortable and irrational. Praying, practicing your morals, living by a certain ethical foundation, and investing time and energy into something that is clearly unclear. It’s a sacred coping mechanism for the irrational fear of death. It’s the calming of the mind with the relief from chaos. However you feel about that or whatever you name it, I have that, and in my certain, personal way, I practice it. If I have to put a sticker on it, I’m Christian. If you look at my bedside table, I have a rosary hanging from my lamp. I think that’s a clear sign, I guess.
Now, religion, though, that is where my historian-self comes out from the dark, and I shout loudly: oh hey, it’s organized. It’s basically the state above the state, the law above the laws, aka the Medieval Age’s Brussels or Hague or UN, shall we say. That’s like, no joke, and in almost all cases, it has very little to do with faith. Christianity is the most centralized, organized, and institutionalized religion in the history of mankind so far, nothing, no other religion could compare. Buddhism is by default fragmented into schools, Hinduism is by gods, and whatever you think about Muslims these days, the very book of the Quran prevents them from keeping one organized Church above their heads.
For Christians, putting a half-naked dude on the cross, surrounded by gold and marble, is totally OK, if not even encouraged. If you want to know where the New World’s gold went with all that El Dorado legend, go to a random basilica in Spain. A small-town church has more gold than Fort Knox. Sometimes, this type of thousand-year-old wealth is working. I remember the first time I went to the Vatican. I entered Saint Peter’s. I mean, whatever you think about Rome, I can guarantee you, you’ll become Christian there. It’s that overpowering.
There are very few sacred places for Christianity. I know there are many, but sacred like Mecca, Varanasi, or Bodh Gaya. I know only a handful. I’ve been to all of them (except Mount Sinai): Jerusalem, Nazareth, Mount Sinai, Cordóba, Rome, etc. But none of them were like Assisi.
To me, there are two types of sacred places, as there are two types of connection to God: organized and community-driven (religion, Church), or personal and lonely (faith). If you have ever been to the original sacred places of Christ, and I hope I won’t offend anyone with this statement, there is nothing remarkable about them. Regardless of how real the route of the Via Dolorosa is, because the original route (if there was any) is 100 feet below the current steps anyway, basic archaeology, the current route itself is unremarkable. The temples that are both in Jerusalem and Nazareth, or I can say Coptic Cairo, are like any old churches from Roman times: nothing fancy. Yet, it is these unremarkable places where you can find the most devout people. The groups singing, praying, and loudly presenting their faith (almost always Americans or Koreans, you never see a European express faith like this) are going through Jerusalem, not the Vatican Museum. You can say that faith presents itself in the most unremarkable places.
Most people know about Saint Francis at least from three sources. One is the previous Pope, Francis, who took his name in honor of Saint Francis. By the way, if you want a great movie, watch The Two Popes, a masterpiece by Fernando Meirelles. I rewatch it almost every year.
Two is from another movie, the flower-power, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, by Franco Zeffirelli. I personally loved that movie, but I know it's controversial. Three is, well, basic history, the story of Saint Francis is popular and is part of regular history classes everywhere (at least in my country).
Because of popular demand, plus because general education is astonishingly crap everywhere, I’m gonna sum up the story of Saint Francis quickly here. I’m not sure if Saint Francis himself got deleted or canceled like Columbus or Admiral Nelson. I assume not, but only because most people on the other side of the pond haven’t really learned much about him. Anyhow, let’s do it now.
Francis was a son of a newly rich cloth merchant in Assisi. At that time (early 1200s), Assisi was split by money: the OG noblemen, heavy on old money, real estate, and connections to the Church (which means Rome, then and now), and the newly rich merchant class, heavy on cash. Francis was part of the new money, so he had all the signs of that class. Think about Jeff Bezos. Tasteless, loud, thinks he can do anything, buy anything, dresses up rich, flamboyant, kinda reckless. Back then, the equivalent of a startup entrepreneur was a knight. Armor costs a lot, waging war is cash-heavy, needed fundraising, and success was not at all guaranteed, but if there was a win, it was a big win. Obviously, Francis wanted to be a knight.
After some forgettable battles, he came home ill, felt kinda lost and without purpose. I’m not saying he found God because of this boredom, but it kinda happened. He wandered among poor people (for the first time, I guess), and at a demolished church (San Damiano), he heard God say, “Rebuild my church.” Now, I’m not sure what this God-guy said precisely, but Francis, as a rich kid, immediately thought about building some big church, something material. I’m guessing God meant something immaterial, but that’s just a guess. Anyhow, Francis started rebuilding the church brick by brick and sold his father’s clothes, money, etc., which led to a break with his family. Rich kid basically refused the family wealth, wandered around naked and in plain clothes, begging for bricks to rebuild the church of San Damiano.
He also met with Chiara (Clare), also from a rich family, but a noble one, not some new money rich kid, old money rich kid, totally different. Clare was breaking up with dad because she didn’t want an arranged marriage, so she married God instead. Together with Francis, they are both Saints in Assisi.
The rest is history, and there are stigmas, pilgrimage to Rome and the Pope, and the current view of Saint Francis as the patron of poor people, the guy who threw away money to be with God. Even his cross is different, a simple Saint Francis Cross, or San Damiano Cross.
Now, you might think, OK, so as a pilgrimage site, this town is probably some reserved, simplistic, monastery-style place, where we, at best, get simple bread with coffee and wine and find a wooden cross. Muhahaha. It’s Roman Catholicism, good morning! The entire town is basically a Catholic Disneyland.
Also, I made the “mistake” of visiting Assisi on the 800th anniversary of Saint Francis's death. So, for the first time, his relics were on display. Thanks to God, I went there weeks after the display was closed, but I know it was a big thing.
The basilica is grand, and it is grand from a distance, which is the harder trick. You see it from the valley road as a long horizontal weight along the end of the ridge, held up on arches, wider than the town it belongs to. In front of it there is a huge sloping field, stone, which functions as a piazza sort-of. Inside, it is a church. I’ll be completely frank. If you have seen five Italian basilicas, you have seen the rest. I live here, and I have seen far more than five. For pilgrims and believers, this is a sacred place with more meaning and a bit more sprinkle of “sacred” compared to other churches. For everyone else, it is another very good church in a country with eight hundred very good churches, and it is not the reason to come.
What it does tell you, standing in it, is that the order he founded is one of the major Catholic orders on earth, fully funded, eight centuries in, with a global institutional footprint and the architecture to prove it. There is nothing poor about it. There is nothing about it that resembles the proud, deliberate poverty of the man in the box downstairs, and I do not think that is an accident or an oversight. It is what happens. It is what always happens.
By the way, adding to the sacred stories, his remains were lost for hundreds of years. By remains, I mean bones and stuff. His successor (Elias, pretty much the founder of the organized Order of Friars Minor) buried him under the altar of their first temple because stealing relics was a big thing even then. He hid it so well that, as the church’s structure changed (now part of the Saint Clare Basilica), the sarcophagus was lost until the early 1800s. Now it is in the crypt of the main basilica, secured by a dual-key system: two keys (S and F) protect it. One is with the bishop of Assisi, and one is with the Friars’ representative. It (the actual remains) was displayed on an extended display for a couple of weeks this year, the first time in modern history, and around half a million pilgrims visited it. I was there weeks later, when it was concluded, so I avoided the big crowds.
The town itself is on the prettier side of the spectrum of generic hilltop towns. I’ve been living in Tuscany for years now, so I have almost no romantic feelings towards hilltop towns, but when I saw Assisi, even with this backup, I said, wow, that’s pretty. It is as you imagine a hilltop town in countryside Italy: stone walls around large palazzo buildings, a church tower, maybe two, a circling road going up to the hill, olive trees on the slopes and a big plain valley underneath. In Assisi, that church is half the city, and it is a basilica.
Francis, by the way, was born in the upper part of the town, like any rich kid. He ventured down to the valley where poor people and farmers (poor people with jobs) lived. Now, the entire upper town is about him, and most people who lived in Assisi now live in Santa Maria, Bastia, or Rivotorto, small towns in the valley below Assisi. Because the town of Assisi, my friends, is about two things, and two things only: tourism services such as restaurants, bars, hotels, and Airbnbs, and the Catholic Disneyland. It’s like Rome’s centro storico, almost no one lives there aside from the tourists.
Part of the Disneyland is amazing, I can’t lie. The basilica looks grandiose, especially from a distance. The San Damiano temple is also great, almost reserved and basic, which is a bit surprising compared to the other parts of this theme park. It’s almost Francis-like. You can also see a lot of priests and nuns, which I personally like a lot: it means the religion is still there. It’s like the churches. If they are full, it means the town has a future.
But the inner streets, the ones that connect the two basilicas (Saint Francis and Saint Clare), are like… Sorry, I couldn’t think of anything else, but this: if Francis, or even Jesus, had seen this, they would be the first to have words against it. The amount of trinkets, stuff, rosaries, basically plastic thrifts of religious souvenirs is suffocating. To me, at least, it goes against everything that Saint Francis has stood for. It’s like the American preachers, who come to the altars to preach about forgiveness and unity with God on their private helicopter. Or the Indian yogi-guru who goes around his ashram in a Rolls Royce (true story, look up Osho, he had an entire collection of RRs). Also, as a cherry on top, it was Assisi where I met the first rude waitress and had bad coffee. In Italy, for God’s sake. What is happening?!
We made the mistake of sitting down for a coffee in a bar near the basilica, mostly because we needed a bathroom and were tired. It was full. The cookies were bland in a way that takes effort, and the coffee arrived tasting of almost nothing at all. In Italy. God has left us all, I guess. The woman working the room looked at every single person who came through the door as an enemy, and served us as though we were personally responsible for this Disneyland.
The room was loud, mostly in English, mostly ordering with the words “I want,” which is not how anyone asks for anything here. Before my Jesus-like forgiveness said “oh but I understand her, this place is so overcrowded”, my obvious Eastern European cynicism kicked in: what did she expect? She works in Assisi in the year of the anniversary. What was her expectation, for real? Upperclass Italians talking with calm passion about local wine? This is not Firenze, lady.
The streets between the two basilicas are where the town loses me. The volume of merchandise is difficult to describe without sounding completely hysterical, so let me just say that there is a great deal of molded plastic in the shape of the poorest man in European history, in racks, at a discount. It is the same picture as the television preacher landing his helicopter behind the church (true story!) where he preaches about giving things up, or the guru with the collection of Rolls Royces parked outside the ashram (true story!).
Near the top, before you reach Clare’s church, there is the house where he grew up, and outside it are statues of his parents. People leave flowers there. People kiss them. His father beat him, dragged him into court, disowned him in public, and as far as anyone knows never spoke to him again. That is not a footnote, that is the central event of the man’s life, and it is written down and everybody can read it. So I don’t know why bother with the flowers. To me, it’s like the worst face of the Church: hypocritical and ignorant of the facts.
We skipped Clare’s basilica. I had reached my limit on the shops and the crowd, and San Damiano is an easier walk anyway, down and out of the walls, ten minutes on a slope with olive trees on it.
It was almost empty. That is the thing I have not been able to let go of since. This is the church he heard the voice in, the church he carried stones for, the church Clare shut herself inside for forty years, the actual location of the entire legend that the town upstairs is built on, and there were maybe a dozen people in it. Small, low, plain, closer to a Roman farm building than to anything with a dome. Old wood and old stone and nothing on sale. Whatever he would have wanted a church to look like, it looks like that.
Afterward we walked out and took pictures of the valley, which is the real advantage of these hill towns: the way the ground drops away and the whole plain lies out flat and green underneath with the villages scattered across it. Most of Assisi lives down there now. Take away the two basilicas and the story, and Assisi is a good-looking Umbrian hill town of no particular fame, in the same weight class as Todi, Spoleto, Gubbio. That is not an insult. That is most of the country.
So, would I recommend Assisi? Absolutely. It is a unique experience. If you are religious and more forgiving than me, it can also be a religious experience. Some things I wouldn’t recommend, though. If you need to eat, do it in the valley towns or in Perugia. If you need to sleep, the answer is the same. Assisi is a day trip from Perugia. You can do it even from Florence or from the sea, like Rimini or Ancona. Half of the town is the two basilicas. It’s a 3-5 hour thing. I got a bit agitated by the theme park effect, I couldn’t bear Disneyland either, so I haven’t walked up the small streets circling the upper town. Those might be less crowded with people and trinket shops.
If Francis were around, I am not entirely sure he could hear God’s command on “rebuild my church” from the noise of the crowds and the bling-bling of the souvenir shops. And I’m not entirely sure that even if he could hear it, he would decide it’s worth building, brick by brick, if hundreds of years later all we end up with is a 50% sale on wood-imitated plastic crosses and buy-2-get-1-free rosaries.
I don’t want to close this article on this note. Because there is another face to this. It could be even worse than it is now. Think about it. The Catholic Church. Rome outlived any empire that hosted it. It is the longest continuous, unbroken administrative chain in the world, in service for about 1,700 years. It is under one man, who is a king, a religious leader (the Pope, also the Bishop of Rome), governed through a thousand-year-old legislative doctrine (The Holy See) that is older than any current nation on the planet. And we haven’t even talked about the previously existing Papal States, the Vatican's financial behemoth built on thousands of years of accumulated wealth, and the land that makes the Church the greatest real estate giant ever.
If you step into Saint Peter’s, this is the weight that pushes you down to the ground. It’s massive, and no other religion is close. Islam has no head, Buddhism has no center, Protestantism is fragmented by default, Judaism is more about the people than the institution, and the other religions are still in either a polytheistic phase or lower. And no matter what current scandals the Church has, there is a Pope, who still preaches on Sundays, every Sunday, in the Vatican. As did any other Pope for the last give or take 1,700 years. A simple altar in a random Catholic church has more history than entire nations.
Compared to this crushing weight, Assisi as a sacred pilgrimage site is still a humble town to visit. There were some crowds around and inside the main basilicas, but nothing compared to the lines to the Vatican. Most roads were still empty compared to the rooms of the Vatican Museum. And I was able to see the interiors of the main basilica almost conveniently.
I almost continued this sentence with a comparison to Saint Peter’s, how crowded it was. But Saint Peter’s is a giant space, unbelievably huge. It is the Church. It never gets empty, and there's always room for more.
