Building on the basilica began two years after Francis's death, which is an irony his stricter followers noticed at the time: an order founded on owning nothing acquired one of the most ambitious churches in Italy, two stacked sanctuaries on a hillside terrace. His body was buried beneath it in secret, out of fear of theft, and was not located again until 1818.
The walls were painted by the best artists available across two generations. Cimabue worked in the upper and lower churches, a cycle of the life of Francis was executed in the upper church around 1300 and has been attributed to Giotto since Vasari, and Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti painted chapels below. Between them they fixed how Francis is imagined, thin, bearded and brown robed, for everyone since. An earthquake in 1997 brought down two vaults, killed four people and destroyed frescoes that were reassembled from fragments over the following years.
In October 1986 John Paul II invited leaders of the world religions to Assisi to pray for peace. The formula was careful: participants prayed separately in different places and then came together, in order to be together to pray rather than to pray together, a distinction devised to meet the objection that the event blurred the differences between religions. It was criticised within the Catholic Church all the same, and by some outside it. The meeting has been repeated at intervals since, and the phrase the spirit of Assisi has become shorthand for interreligious encounter.