The Basilica of St Francis in Assisi is the burial church of Francis, one of the most beloved saints of Christianity, and a founding monument of Western painting that is also a working friary.
Francis and the basilica
Francis of Assisi, who died in 1226 and was canonised within two years, renounced wealth to live in radical poverty and founded the Franciscan order; his devotion to the poor, to creation and to the humanity of Christ reshaped Western Christianity. The basilica was begun immediately after his canonisation and built into the side of the hill on two levels, the Lower and Upper Churches, with his tomb in a crypt below both. That a saint of poverty is honoured by so grand a church is a tension the Franciscan tradition has felt from the beginning.
The frescoes
The walls of the two churches carry fresco cycles by the greatest painters of the age, including work associated with Cimabue and Giotto, above all the celebrated cycle of the life of St Francis in the Upper Church. These paintings are a turning point in the history of European art, in the move toward naturalism and human feeling, and they are the decoration of a living friary rather than the contents of a gallery; a Franciscan community lives and prays here.
Assisi and peace
Assisi has made a particular kind of hospitality its work. The interfaith World Day of Prayer for Peace, convened here in 1986 and repeated since, has attached the name of the town to interreligious encounter as much as to the medieval saint. Damaged by an earthquake in 1997 and carefully restored, the basilica remains a major place of pilgrimage and a World Heritage site, and Francis is a patron saint of Italy and of ecology.