Assisi

Francis was the son of a cloth merchant, and the decisive scene of his conversion took place in the square at Assisi, where he handed back to his father the money and the clothes he had from him and stood naked until the bishop covered him. What followed was a life organised around literal readings: repair my house, so he rebuilt a ruined chapel; take nothing for the journey, so the brothers took nothing. He preached to whoever would listen, went to Egypt during a crusade and obtained an audience with the sultan, and in 1224 on Mount La Verna received the marks that his companions described as the wounds of the crucifixion. Dying and nearly blind, he composed the Canticle of the Creatures, addressing the sun, the moon, wind, water, fire, the earth and finally death as brother and sister, in one of the earliest surviving poems in Italian.

Clare, of a noble family of the same town, left her home in 1212 to join him, and the community of women that formed at San Damiano lived enclosed. Her long fight was to be allowed to hold nothing at all, since the church preferred convents to have endowments so that enclosed women would not starve; the rule guaranteeing her the privilege of poverty was approved two days before she died in 1253.

The order split over the same question after Francis's death, between those who wanted the rule kept literally and those who accepted property held on the brothers' behalf. The dispute ran for a century and ended with the strict position condemned as heresy in 1323.

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.