We slept in this morning and woke up to the good news that the Oregon Ducks had won a thriller against Ohio State, so the day began on a happy note. After a hearty breakfast and a good cup of coffee we headed down the hill to Assisi to go to the St. Francis of Assisi Basilica.
We had thought of going to the Basilica tomorrow as the weather was supposed to be better for pictures, but when we checked the website for the Basilica it said they were closed for a special event. It turns out that Assisi is hosting a meeting of the G7 committee for disability on Monday. As a result the security at the Basilica was extremely high with every type of police officer in Italy present from the local police to the national police called the Carabineri represented, even the Finance Police and the Italian Army had a couple of representatives on hand.
We arrived at the end of the last mass of the day so we had to wait until it was over before entering the church. We spent some time wandering the grounds, and came across a garden attached to the Basilica that had some nice artwork in it.
The Basilica is divided into two churches, the lower one contains the remains of St. Francis who is the male patron saint of Italy. You usually have to pay to enter but we were lucky that it was free today.
Ton was very frustrated by their no photo policy. She thinks that most people will have only one chance to visit a place like this and as long as they are respectful and do not use flash what is the harm in allowing them to preserve the memory. The lower church has really beautiful art work by some of the greatest masters of Italian art. It is quite beautiful, but you will have to take our word for it.
The upper church is larger than the lower church and is used to hold the masses on site. The art work is not as impressive as the lower church, partially because the upper church was heavily damaged during the earth quake of 1997 when the main dome collapsed.
Assisi is built on a very steep hill and you are either walking downhill or uphill. So after our visit to the Basilica we found a place advertising €5 panini’s. We shared a table with two women from Peru who convinced us to try a glass of the local wine (it did not take much convincing), we enjoyed our conversation in Spanglish about Italy and Assisi.
We spent some time people watching on the streets of Assisi. Today we heard much more Italian being spoken, though American English was a close second.
Finally after stalling as long as we could we decided to make the long climb back to our campground. Today we probably climbed the equivalent of 1000 feet as well as 15,000 steps. So when we made it back to François we were ready for a rest.