Assisi: Home of St. Francis

Assisi is perched on the side of a mountain and is a quaint and charming town. It is worth a visit for that alone. However, it is best known as the home of St. Francis of Assisi. Born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone in 1181 or 1182, he became a humanitarian, writer, and the founder of the Franciscan Order. You may know him best for this prayer:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love; for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

The town was settled before the Romans arrived, but they are the ones who built the first walls to surround it. That’s the Old Gate in the next picture. It is called that because the town kept growing, and there were eventually three sets of walls and gates.

We saw many interesting sites in Assisi, but the Basilica (Church) of St. Francis was the best of all. That’s the next photo.

The upper level of the Basilica is covered with approximately two dozen frescos showing scenes from St. Francis’s life. The frescos are attributed to Giotto di Bondone and his assistants and were done in the late 1290s. Photos weren’t allowed inside, so I got this one from the Internet.* It shows St. Francis preaching to the birds.

It’s easy to get inspired by other writers when you visit their birthplaces. Especially when those places are as charming as Assisi.

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*  The frescos are in the public domain because of their age.

Florence

Our next major stop was in Florence, where we spent three nights at the Hotel California. Don’t stay there. (The hotel, that is. Florence is a must see.)

Florence is the birthplace of two famous writers. The first is Carlo Lorenzini (pen name Carlo Collodi), who wrote The Adventures of Pinocchio in the early 1880s. Pinnochio dolls and puppets and souveniers are everywhere throughout the city. I didn’t take any pictures of them, and I regret that now. The drawing at the top of this page came from the Internet and is by Carlo Chiostri, who illustrated the 1901 edition.*

Centuries earlier another famous writer was born in Florence. Dante Alighieri (author of The Divine Comedy) was born sometime around 1265, although his exact birthdate is unknown. He had a very checkered history in his home town and was eventually exiled for alleged corruption. That’s his birthplace in the second picture.

In those days, only the privileged few could read. This was still the case when the Renaissance began. Most people learned history and Bible stories through oral tradition or art, such as the Bible stories cast in metal on the door to the Florence Baptistry (the building where people were baptized). The picture shows only the top half, and even it is a reproduction of the original, which is in safekeeping in the Duomo (cathedral) museum.

Then there is Michelangelo, born in Florence in 1475. His famous statue of David used to stand at the entrance of the Palazzo Vecchio but was replaced by a copy to protect it from vandals. We saw the copy, but we also saw the original in its current home at the Galleria dell ’Accademia. That’s the original in the photo.

For us, Florence was mostly a place to view art. We spent our free day in the Accademia and the larger Uffizi Gallery. At the Uffizi we saw many paintings by Botticelli as well as a few works by Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo. Then we went out for a nice dinner.

It was a great way to spend our 39^th wedding anniversary.

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* Chiostri’s drawings are in the public domain because of their age.

Venice

Our Italian vacation took us to Venice, where master craftsmen create art with glass for the medium. We stayed at the classic Hotel Giorgione, and the first thing we saw upon entering was the huge chandelier that extends from the ceiling almost to the floor. Garish, but very impressive. I guess art in any medium is in the eye of the beholder.

We took a walking tour in the morning and saw sights such as the Grand Canal, St. Mark’s Cathedral, and the Bridge of Sighs. The bridge got that name because prisoners sighed as they walked across it on their way to the dungeons, which was basically a death sentence.

After the local tour, we took a gondola ride and then returned to our hotel. But the walk back didn’t turn our quite as we expected. Instead, we made a discovery that turned out to be common among our tour group: Venice is an easy place to get lost in.

Our main tour guide had given us maps but told us they weren’t much use, and she was right. She told us to follow the signs to Rialto, but that didn’t help much, either, since those signs were few and far between. And when we were finally able to follow them, they took us a round-about way that ended up in the same spot we would have reached by going straight. Roland is convinced that the signs were designed to lead us by certain shops or at least along the streets with the most stores.

I can’t resist a writing analogy here. Stories often take us out of our way. When done for pacing or suspense, those detours lead us by the stores we want to visit. But we have all read books that take us down deserted streets or ones with uninteresting shops. A good writer knows the difference and resists the temptation to use a detour that bores rather than enlightens.

We did make it back to our hotel eventually, and we enjoyed our time in Venice.

Nothing Goes as Planned

We just returned from a seventeen-day vacation to Italy. It was a good trip, but it got off to a bad start. No, I didn’t get arrested, but an Italian police car was one of my first photos from the trip.

Our flight landed in Milan on time, and a van hired by Go Ahead Tours picked us and some of our fellow travelers up at the airport for the one-hour drive to our hotel in Lecco. We were probably about halfway there when the van lost all power and coasted to the side of the road. After waiting in the hot sun for over a half-hour, we were finally rescued by a bus from the same company and taken the rest of the way.

Not a good start, but tomorrow was another day. That morning was set up with an optional excursion (which we didn’t take) and free time for the rest of us. Then we were to join up for a visit to Villa Carlotta and a brief tour of the town of Como. Villa Carlotta (a castle on the other side of Lake Como that had been built for a princess) was part of the package, and we were looking forward to it.

The group that went on the morning excursion made it to their destination and then took a boat ride on the lake before being dropped off at Villa Carlotta, as planned. At noon, the tour bus driver picked us and the others who had opted out of the morning excursion up, again according to plan. But after driving at least an hour along Lake Como through gorgeous mountain scenery, the bus was stopped by a police barricade and the driver was told that the road was closed.

The other group got to see Villa Carlotta but had to find another way back and returned via an excursion boat that took 2 ½ hours. They told us later that Villa Carlotta was overrun with a hundred school children whose teachers exercised no control whatsoever, and the same school children shared the excursion boat with them. That group didn’t see anything of Como.

For the rest of us, the driver took us to Como and said he would pick us up at 7:30 p.m. That gave us over six hours to entertain ourselves in a town with one or two hours of sights. We would have preferred to go back to the hotel but weren’t given that option. To be fair, it would have put a lot of extra miles on the bus and might have put the driver over his legal driving time limit.

After the first two days everything went pretty much as planned and we had a great tour. I highly recommend Go Ahead Tours and we will probably use them again.

Writing can also have unexpected detours. I thought I had my next few books planned. After my current two works in progress, I was going to write about life on the Erie Canal followed by a book on a lighthouse keeper’s daughter. Those are still in the plans, but another idea may take precedence. I don’t remember how I discovered it, but when I heard that many immigrants were stranded on Ellis Island for weeks or even months, I couldn’t get the thought out of my head. And even though I’m not ready to write it yet, I’ve already made lots of notes on a potential plot. I’m much farther ahead on it than on the other two, so it looks as if Ellis Island will be next.

Whether it’s travel or writing, we should be prepared for unexpected detours.

And they aren’t always bad.