Exploring Florence

   

 “...con altra voce omai, con altro vello

ritornerò poeta, e in sul fonte

del mio battesmo prenderò cappello...”

-Dante, La Divine Commedia, Paradiso, Canto XXV

On my first free weekend, I paid a visit to the legendary city of Florence. I had remembered that from my first visit to Assisi with my family about four years ago that there were trains directly from Florence just like there were to Rome.

In fact, it was more complicated for me to get from my house in Assisi to the local train station than to get from that station to Florence. This is because the old historic city of Assisi sits up on a hill overlooking the valley (most ancient and medieval cities were built that way for defense reasons). Instead of sending the train up there, tracks pass through the commune of Santa Maria degli Angeli, a small town just below Assisi. The Porziuncola where St. Francis first heard the call to the vocation he would pursue and where he gathered his first friars around him. Now, of course, the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli (a truly gorgeous baroque basilica) is built around it. I will speak more about the Porziuncola later in this post.

However, for my trip to Florence, I went rather underprepared, having only solidified the necessary arrangements (like buying the train tickets and reserving entrance to the Uffizi) the night before at around 11:30 p.m.

Having never been to Florence before, I found myself flipping through a 2003 Fodor’s Italy guidebook in the library of the residence where I am staying. The guidebook actually had some very helpful tips on visiting the city, and it helped me to focus my top destinations since I would only have one day to visit. For short, day visits, planning is the key, and blessedly, I was able to arrange all of the essentials even with the short runway I had left myself.

On the morning of my little trip within my trip, I woke up at about 4:30 to give myself enough time to get myself ready, get my bag together, and hike down to the Santa Maria degli Angeli train station in time for my 6:30 a.m. train.

I slipped out through the front door and zigzagged downhill through the desolate streets of Assisi and then along a long empty country road, still tranquil at that early hour of the morning.

Assisi is increasingly a city of tourists, vacationers, and pilgrims, and such people have no reason to get up at such an unreasonable hour on a Saturday.

The train ride passed uneventfully as most train rides do, and by 8:30, the train was pulling into the station of Santa Maria Novella. I had arrived.

The Santa Maria Novella train station is situated right next to Florence’s Centro Storico, the rather compact but fascinating historical district of the city filled with some of the richest bits of the city’s long past. It is in this part of Florence where I spent my entire day.

Upon getting out of the train, I figured that the first order of business was to get to a Mass. Thinking that the most obvious place to go was the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, or more commonly known as Florence Cathedral. It is the one with the large red-tiled duomo that is so commonly seen in pictures of Florence’s skyline.

Upon arriving, I realized that the large church did not have a clear entrance, so I went up to someone who looked like they knew a thing or two about what was going on.

“Could you tell me how I could get in to the Cathedral?” I asked in Italian.

“It opens at 10:00,” I was told.

“But isn’t there Mass earlier?” I insisted.

“No,” I was told. It opened at 10:00.

Well, that was alright, I told myself. I would go to an evening Mass as I had found out there was to be one at 5:00. That would be plenty of time before my train at 8:15 and would allow me to have dinner afterwards. One trick I have learned for visiting famous churches on limited time is to combine the visit with a Mass because then you get to spend more time in the space and pray in it, which is always more meaningful to me than just walking through a church as one would a museum. And also you get to skip the line.

In the meantime, I walked down to a well-known café I had read about called Gilli, which is located on the Piazza della Repubblica, one of the biggest and most notable squares in Florence, having been the old Roman forum and thus the center of the city in Roman days.

In medieval times, it was the location of the market, and the Jewish ghetto was also situated near there. In fact, two synagogues were located on the square, though neither of them are still in operation today.

Gilli Caffe has an interesting story itself, having been founded in a different location by a Swiss family of the same name in 1773. It moved once in the late nineteenth century and then again in the early 1920s to its current location. It quickly became one of the city’s “literary cafés,” a kind of venue that I also described a bit during my time in Paris. The particularly attentive readers might remember my mentioning Les Deux Magots, where Jean-Paul Sartre and several of his friends were known to hold meetings in the 1950s.

In this case, Gilli was a café that came to be associated with the Futurist movement of the early twentieth century, an artistic and literary movement born in Italy that emphasized speed, progress forward, and the new technologies that seemed to about in accelerating rapidity in the early 1900s. The train, the telegraph, the automobile… All of these were the way of the future, said the futurists. We must not worry ourselves about our old, stuffy libraries any longer, they would insist. Science and innovation in technology are the future of man.

Such thinkers as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Alberto Caligiani were known to frequent the caffè.

At the same time, tourists, particularly British, began to frequent the city in increasing numbers, as described in period novels such as E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View. The caffè became a favorite for them as well. In the novel, the use of the standard English-language guidebook, Baedeker’s, is spoofed as a humorous way to be chaperoned about the city by some unknown “expert.” However, it was only a very faint tremor of the kind of enormous enterprise that mass tourism would become in the ensuing decades.

When I entered the caffè, I immediately noticed the high arched doorways, the rich wood paneled walls, the marble countertop on the bar so clean that I could check my teeth on it, and the waiters bustling about in immaculate white shirts and navy blue vests with matching bow ties.

Like a true Italian, I consumed my croissant and coffee al bar, that is to say, at the bar. Italians do this because they are generally in a hurry for breakfast and because sitting at a table incurs a service fee while eating at the bar does not.

After having finished this rather dignified meal, I walked down to the Santa Maria Novella Cathedral, having read that it was a church worth visiting while in the city. I was a bit surprised to be charged an admittance fee as it is an operating church. However, the admission included entry to the adjoining museum, so I decided to make the most of it.

The church has a rather distinctive white façade with intricate dark green lines intertwining across the front. This is seen in a number of Florentine churches, but I have not seen this outside the region of Tuscany. Of course, they do exist, such as Orvieto Cathedral in Umbria, but I do believe it is primarily a Tuscan style.

The church was completed in 1420, after nearly 200 years of construction, and served as a hub for the Dominican order in Florence.

The interior is particularly striking for its intricate Renaissance-era paintings, particularly the two behind the altar, which I have photographed and included. One depicts the life of the Virgin Mary, including her birth, presentation in the temple, marriage to Joseph, the murder of the innocents, and her assumption. The other depicts the life of John the Baptist. These two saints often are on either side of the altar in older churches, symbolizing the old and new covenants.

Also in the church are two very notable works including Giotto’s Crucifix, an early work of his, as well as Masaccio’s Holy Trinity, notable for its use of linear perspective.

It is a beautiful Renaissance church, well worth simply wandering around in for a while and praying in. The stained glass windows are also quite elegant and liberally feature Dominicans such as St. Thomas Aquinas or St. Dominic himself.

Since where the museum is now used to be a convent, on the interior is a beautiful courtyard, quiet and peaceful, with birds singing that one could simply spend some decompression time in.

However, since I was not wishing to waste any of my time in Florence, once I was satisfied I had seen the important parts of the church, I decided to move onto my next destination.

At this point, after running an errand that would have been more difficult in Assisi and after helping an Argentinian couple get headed in the right direction to find their hotel, I ended up in a small, hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant for lunch.

My bodily needs having been sated, I headed myself in the direction of the Uffizi. Along the way, I walked across the Ponte Vecchio, a well-known bridge across the River Arno. The bridge is adorned with little jewelry shops that from a distance give it a unique appearance, as of having little houses situated on it, overlooking the river.

The Uffizi are art galleries that contain works starting in the Roman era (primarily sculptures) through late medieval works (such as those of Giotto), the Italian Renaissance, and the baroque period.  The museum was constructed in the late sixteenth century to hold some of the great treasures of Florentine art since Florence had been the premier hub of the art world during the Renaissance. The Uffizi are the most visited art museum in Italy and have survived much over the years, including a car bomb explosion in 1993 that damaged nearly forty pieces of art.

Much as I said with regards to the Louvre, I do not wish to systematically catalogue all of the pieces of art in the museum, nor do I wish to do some kind of exhaustive analysis of the building as a whole; rather I will simply stick to works that are especially well-known or which particularly impressed me.

Upon arriving at the top floor where the visit begins, the visitor will notice that the building follows a square design and that the central hallway is of a particularly majestic sort, with woodframed windows and detailed frescoes on the ceilings. Along the left and right sides are statues and busts from the Roman period. Every few feet, there is a gallery on the left-hand side which follows a chronological sequence, starting with the oldest works and moving towards the most recent. But obviously the oldest of all are in the hallway, so I walked fully around the building through the hallways first in order to properly appreciate the sculptures before even entering the side halls.

To me, however, the works of Giotto and those of the Florentine are the cream of the Uffizi’s crop. I have always loved the Middle Ages’s very didactic art and iconography, though I cannot help but appreciate with the Renaissance’s irrepressible desire for physical beauty. The inherent goodness and orderliness in the human person and in architecture has always agreed with me, and the Florentine renaissance has produced some objectively dazzling products of human creativity.

However, to start with Giotto, a painter about whom very little is known but whose influence on the Renaissance is hard to understate, a work that I quite liked was the Madonna and Child Enthroned with Angels and Saints. This seems to me (someone untrained in art or art history) to be a nice bridge between the medieval iconography and the later Renaissance art. The figures are graceful with upturned gazes to the central figure of the Virgin Mary with the child Jesus. The sense of perspective as the Virgin holds the Child is quite nicely done, in my opinion.

Another image of the same subjects is The Virgin and Child Enthroned between St. Sebatian and St. John. This one was particularly noted during the Renaissance because of St. Sebastian’s seeming obliviousness to the pain being endured from the arrows he has been struck with.

Another Biblical scene that is the subject of many paintings from this time is the Annunciation, and one of the nicest I think is Leonardo da Vinci’s version, also included here. The Virgin is shown reading a text and in a posture of both serenity and surprise (indicated by the elevated right hand). It is one of da Vinci’s earlier works, and it is often remarked that the Virgin’s calmness marked a bit of a break with art that showed her averting her gaze or in a particularly submissive posture. The painting has been praised for the very birdlike style of Gabriel’s wings.

Then there is, of course, Rafael’s famous portrait of Pope Leo X reading a Bible and flanked by two cardinals. Leo X was one of the most important of the Medici popes; his Pontifiate included the break with Martin Luther and the first Spanish mission to Mexico.

One of the most impressive rooms in the Uffizi is the Niobe room, a majestic hall filled with various sculptures and immense paintings, such as Henry IV’s Triumphant Entry into Paris, which is just lovely to behold.

Another room worth mentioning is La Tribuna, a room with red velvet walls containing the “crown jewels” of the Medici family’s art collection, granted by Francesco I de’ Medici in 1584 to the Tuscan government. It is a bit like forbidden fruit, however, since you are not allowed to enter but only to stand at the entrance and admire it for about ten seconds before behind hustled out by security guards.

Towards the end of the tour are the self-portraits of notable artists, which are more numerous than I expected. I will include four here: Raffaello Sanzio, Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, and Diego Velazquez. I leave you to figure out who is who.

The artist Filippo Lippi, who when young would reportedly fill his school notebooks and textbooks with nothing but drawings, produced one of my favorite images of the Virgin and Baby Jesus. Madonna with the Child and Two Angels captures the grace and beauty of the Virgin Mary as well as her solemn adoration of her divine Son. The joyful mischief on the face of the leading angel provides a lighthearted contrast.

There was also The Adoration of the Child by Correggio, a sixteenth century painter. This painting, taking inspiration from St. Bridget of Sweden’s account of the Virgin’s adoration of the Christ child at dawn, does a beautiful job not only of showing the Virgin Mary’s unique love for her Son but also showing probably the first instance of what we now know as Eucharistic adoration, simply sitting with Jesus and looking upon Him. Correggio was a master of using light and darkness in a proper and efficacious way, a technique known as chiascuro. I especially like how here, the Mother’s face and that of the Child are illuminated by a soft light, so subtly done that we only see the illumination it produces and not the light itself.

 Moving along, we find Giorgio Vasari’s portrait of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the head of one of the most important Italian banking families in the late 1400s. The Medicis quite literally transformed politics through their banking practices. Previous to that period, monarchs had been little more than very powerful nobles, the noble that the others recognized as the de facto leader of the realm. However, their power depended on staying in good graces with the nobles, keeping the realm safe, and projecting power and influence. Otherwise, the monarch would begin to lose his influence and face a rebellion. Oftentimes nobles were given titles or posts in order to reward them for loyalty or to ensure their future cooperation.

Unlike the common portrayal of the Middle Ages, it was actually quite a complicated system, and it served as a check on the monarch’s absolute power.

Through the rise in modern banking such as the Medicis oversaw, monarchs could now systematically borrow much larger sums of money than every before and in so doing finance much larger armies, now no longer local militias scrambled in times of need to defend against petty invasions by a nearby lord, but massive merchant armies, capable of invading whole kingdoms and waging multiple-year campaigns.

A successful war would mean enough spoils to pay off the debt owed to the banks, and if the war was not successful, the banking families still could be assured of their payments because with his standing army, the king could effectively enforce the collection of taxes. Politics would never be the same again.

In Vasari’s portrait, however, Lorenzo is shown in simple clothes with a drawn, lined, melancholic face. He is surrounded by garish masks, clearly reminding the viewer of the finite life of man and the inherent poverty therein which every man possesses, even the rich.

As I say, there are many other works of art in the Uffizi which are worth mentioning, many that I wished to include but could not. However, after satisfying myself that I had visited all the corners of this extraordinary museum, I exited and directed my steps towards Santa Maria del Fiore.

Santa Maria del Fiore is the crown jewel of Florentine architecture, and it is impossible to miss when one visits the city. Pictures taken of the skyline are dominated by this imposing church with its enormous dome. Its story is nothing short of exceptional.

The story of the church begins in the late thirteenth century, during Florence’s ascension to economic dominance. The city, which had not reaped the full benefits of the Italian economic boom that had lifted neighboring city-states like Pisa, in the thirteenth century began to see its day finally come. The city’s wool refineries, settled on the River Arno’s stable waters were the beginning of the emerging textile industry. A key innovation in commerce during this time was the invention of the florin, a gold coin used for currency. The florin, one of the first truly gold currencies in Europe for quite some time, quickly spread around the region, replacing the Carolingian denarius and the Pisan grosso (which were both silver). It included a complex design that guarded against counterfeit coins, and soon many parts of the continent were using the florin. This fueled a rapid rise for city and facilitated the commercialization of the Mediterranean, as any transaction could be effected with any region now that the exchange rate and rampant risk of counterfeiting was avoided.

The merchants of Florence also began to transform European commerce through their innovations such as bills of exchange (whereby a purchase could be made without money directly on hand) and double-entry bookkeeping (whereby all income and output can be measured next to each other to assess overall assets). These inventions also preceded the rise of the banking families like the Medici I mentioned a short while ago because out of this new, ascendant merchant class would come brokers who would go beyond simple bills of exchange to loaning large amounts of moneys to companies or stock ventures in order to enable them to take advantage of a commercial opportunity. In return, that loaner (or banker) would receive some price reduction on his future purchases (the interest). With time, certain particularly successful bankers such as the Medici would come to be able not just to loan money to commercial ventures but to kings and nobles.

In the midst of this economic ascension, it became obvious that the city’s cathedral, built in the fifth century, and literally falling apart from age and neglect, was not sufficient or suitable for the city’s growing population and needs.

In 1294, the city approved a design for a new church submitted by Arnolfo di Cambio, who had designed the Church of Santa Croce and the Palazzo Vecchio. Construction began, but when Arnolfo died only eight years later, the pace slackened until the Arte della Lana, the wool merchant guild (and therefore the guild in charge of one of the most important commercial activities in the city) assumed the patronage of the project. Giotto, who was mentioned earlier, was brought in and designed the campanile, or bell tower. By 1380, the main church was complete and ready for use.

The only hurdle still left to conquer was the construction of the dome. A church of these proportions must have a majestic dome befitting the great city it was in, and Arnolfo di Cambio’s original plan included one.

In 1418, the guild announced a competition for the design of the dome. The race came down to two main competitors: Lorenzo Ghiberti (whose masterpiece were the Gates of Paradise gold doors on the Baptistery in front of the Cathedral) and Filippo Brunelleschi, two bitter rivals. Brunelleschi won but was soon probably asking himself why he had thrown his hat in the ring for such an imposing undertaking. He was, after all, a goldsmith by training, and the project before him was enough to stump even the best engineering minds.

The dome had to be built on the existing church walls and cover a horizontal distance of nearly 150 feet. Additionally, the design called for not using flying buttresses, the Gothic innovation for dealing with the weight of such a dome.

What Brunelleschi did was to construct two domes, one nestled inside the other, with four chains around the inner dome to prevent the spreading force that threatened the structural integrity. Further, to enable to bricks to be laid in the dome shape, Brunelleschi invented a new form of laying the bricks so that they would not fall of as they were being laid in an ever-inclining pattern.

Brunelleschi also invented other mechanisms to facilitate the construction, including amphibious boats to prevent the marble for the interior being damaged in land transport from the harbor. He also designed an ox-powered crane to get the enormous stones high enough for laying.

The actual interior of the dome is something extraordinary to behold. There is an interweaving, vivid depiction of the Last Judgment that was begun by Giorgio Vasari (the one who painted the portrait of Lorenzo de Medici I mentioned earlier) and finished by Federico Zuccari.

The façade of the Cathedral was added much later, in the 1860s by Emilio di Fabris. It is di Fabris’s capolavoro, and it includes white, red, and green marble in an intricate and very beautiful neogothic pattern that blends in well with the surrounding structures such as the Baptistery.

I was able to make it in to the Cathedral after normal visiting hours by attending the 5:00 p.m. evening Mass. The Mass was in a side chapel, but afterward the usher let me photograph the nave and the inside of the dome, which pictures I have included here.

The Baptistery, which stands in front of the basilica, is a remarkable structure all on its own; having been consecrated in 1059, it was the site where the great poet Dante was baptized, as he remarks himself in the quote I included at the beginning of this post.

The design is quite original, seeming to gain some inspiration from the Pantheon in Rome, but overall seeming to exhibit a sort of proto-Renaissance style, which is quite mysterious given that it was built centuries before the Renaissance. I was not able to enter the Baptistery since I was a bit short on time, and it was necessary to pay an entrance fee. However, I was able to see the circular dome with its elegant frescoes from the doorway.

After visiting the Cathedral and the Baptistery, I had some dinner, walked along the River Arno, and then headed back towards the train station for my evening train back to Assisi.

As we left the station, I caught my last few glimpses of the famous Duomo and then was comfortably gliding along back towards the south. I had to be sure not to fall asleep during the train journey for fear of missing my stop. I did not wish to wake up and find myself in Foligno, which was the train’s final destination. However, after two and a half hours had elapsed slowly enough, I heard the conductor call, “Prossima fermata: Assisi!” over the loudspeaker and made my way to the door.

At that late hour (it was past 10:30 when I got to the station), there were no taxis, and I was not certain if there were any buses. Not wanting to wait, I immediately set off walking.

However, it is not a short journey on foot, and it is steeply uphill. From the valley it is not so hard as one can simply look up and see the city spread before him and walk in that general direction. However, my phone died just as I entered the city walls, and I was not comfortable enough with all the streets and alleys to find my way back to the Casa Papa Giovanni, so with the help of some slightly intoxicated men outside I restaurant, I found my way to San Francesco’s and from there to the guesthouse.

It had been a long day with an early departure and late arrival home, but it was quite worth it to get to know as extraordinary a city as Florence and bask in the richness of its history. My next post will be concerned with the next week of classes and my visit to Pisa the following weekend.

To see all of Asher's dispatches from his journey click HERE

Children's Rosary June 2026 Newsletter

    
                                            To view our newsletter click below:

Children's Rosary® June 2026 Newsletter

A Teacher Shares Her Experiences of the Children's Rosary

 “My name is Ann Wharton and I am filled with joy this morning as we gather for our weekly rosary.

I am a primary school teacher in a rural school, Aghatubrid N.S., Caherciveen, Co. Kerry, Ireland.  I asked my principal for permission and she was very supportive. We started our Children’s Rosary group in March 2025 and meet every Friday morning in our sacred place in school. All pupils and staff gather. I had been thinking about setting it up for many months/years and am so grateful to God that I finally got the confidence. Of all the initiatives and projects that I have been involved in during my teaching career, this is the most beautiful and the most rewarding.

The children really love praying the rosary and singing ‘Children’s Rosary Song’. They say that they love that ‘everyone is in it together’, that they ‘get to pray to Mary’ , that it’s ‘relaxing’, ‘a break from class’ and that they can tell Mary their worries and feel her love. There is an amazing sense of peace as we finish the Rosary and sometimes, nobody gets up to leave. The children just love to sit in the peace and soak up all the graces. Sometimes, I sense pure joy as the children are singing the Children’s Rosary song and have to hold back the tears. The children love to lead each decade and place the roses at Our Lady’s feet. 

It was really easy to set up the Children’s Rosary group as the founder, Blythe Kaufman has all the necessary guidelines on her website, all the steps are laid out clearly and she is never more than an email away. Catherine (in Ireland) was amazing. She sent me on all the necessary materials, prayer cards, rosaries and everything else I needed. She was truly wonderful and really encouraging.

I would encourage any teacher who is thinking of setting up a Children’s rosary group, to do so You will be amazed at how straightforward it is and you will never regret it.”

Ann Wharton, Teacher

Aghatubrid N.S., Caherciveen, Co. Kerry, Ireland.

Mass Offered on June 1, 2026 for Seminarians

A Mass was offered on June 1, 2026 for all seminarians that they will grow in holiness and lead us all in love. Every month, we have a Mass offered for this intention. As our seminarians will be the future shepherds and our children are their future flock, it seemed a beautiful way for the children to help with their prayers.  It is our goal to feature a different seminarian on the first of the month every month by inviting him to share something of himself and giving all our readers the opportunity to pray for him. This month, we are featuring Zachary Phelps, a seminarian from the Archdiocese of Hartford (shown above). He has been assisting in the home parish for the Children's Rosary in West Hartford, Connecticut. 

"My name is Zachary Phelps and I am a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Hartford. When I was young, I would have pretend Mass in my kitchen and ask my mom questions about the priesthood. But for quite a while, I lost interest in the priesthood, but God did not lose interest in calling me. I remember being at a conference and in a time of prayer hearing the word “priest” in my mind and I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. I wanted to be like everybody else by getting married and having a family. Even with my initial and stubborn “no”, God did not give up so easily. He kept gently and lovingly reminding me that this was something he wanted me to pursue. Through friends, random people, and my own prayer, God would slightly tap me on the shoulder, reminding me of this call. 

After graduating college, a major shift happened. I started attending a group called Crossroads for Christ. This was a group of young adults who spent time discussing the faith, growing in fellowship, and most importantly spending time together in Adoration with our Lord present in the Eucharist. I believe that in many ways through this group, the Lord fostered and nurtured my call and softened my heart to want to say “yes” to his plan for my life. I even remember praying for God to align my desires with his desires. Over time, becoming a priest became a burning desire of my heart, sometimes bringing me to tears. The Holy Spirit gave me the courage to take that first step and call the vocations office. 

That was just over two years ago. Now I will be headed to Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in the fall. The journey of discernment has been quite an interesting one, but one that has been so beautiful and healing for me. The Lord has done a lot of work in my heart through this process and allowed me to grow closer to him by trusting more deeply in his love and mercy and recognizing that I am a beloved son the Father. This time of my life has helped me tremendously, not only in the hopes of being a good and holy seminarian and priest but just being a good and holy man. This, of course, will be a blessing no matter where the Lord leads me. 

I have also grown deeply into a relationship with the Blessed Virgin Mary. Our Mother Mary has been such a source of comfort, confidence, and peace. This has come to me especially through the rosary and Marian consecration. I have placed my whole entire vocation into her hands. I placed my whole life there and through her hands everything is offered to God. She has crushed many fears and provided me with help in fighting many evils deterring me from this path. Our Heavenly Father placed Jesus into her hands, so what better place could all my intentions and every part of my heart and life be? The loving gaze and help of this mother that the Lord has provided for me has helped me on my journey and she has shown me a beautiful side of our Lord’s love and heart. 

I am so thankful for this wonderful gift and the many blessings the Lord has given me as I have taken steps to hear his voice, listen to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, try more and more to fully surrender to his will and say “yes” just like Mary did. Because of the way the Lord has shaped my life the past two years, I think every Catholic man should at least ask God about and be open to the call to the priesthood. Being open to God’s will brings many needed graces to be the saints God is calling us to be. I’m so excited for the journey ahead. I know Mary and all my saint friends will be by my side and Jesus, the Good Shepherd will always lead me. Please keep me in your prayers. Praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever."

We humbly ask that you please keep Zachary Phelps in your prayers.

Cross Country Children's Rosary with Lebanon and South Africa June 6, 2026

Two Children's Rosary groups will be uniting in prayer on June 6. Each will meet at their respective parish and pray together. The children will pray at 4:00 p.m. in South Africa and 5:00 p.m. local time in Lebanon. The two Children's Rosary groups are from St. Elias Rihaniyeh Church Baabda, Lebanon and Our Lady of Cedars Woodmead Maronite Catholic Church in Sandton, South Africa. The children will be able to see and hear each other through a projection on a screen in each church. Watch the invitation video at this link. A special thank you to all the organizers. 

Members of the Children's Rosary Celebrate the Jubilee of St. Francis of Assisi in Nigeria

Members of the Children's Rosary joined the Bishop of Shendam, Nigeria in celebrating the Jubilee of St. Francis. The Jubilee event was held at St Francis Parish Mabudi in the Shendam Diocese. Through the visit of the members of the Children's Rosary to the event the parish of St Francis has decided to initiate a Children's Rosary there. 

Members of the Children's Rosary group shared Children's Rosary prayer booklets to the children of St Francis Parish Mabudi where the celebratory event and Mass were held. The parish indicated they would be starting a Children's Rosary. The missionary efforts of the children were indeed fruitful!

Exploring Assisi

Asher Kaufman, at 18, set out on June 28 for a yearlong trip to help spread the Children's Rosary in Europe and Africa. He spent the months of July, August and the first two weeks in September in France. He went on to visit Belgium, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar, South Africa, Cameroon, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Lesotho, Mozambique, Botswana, Namibia and he is now in Italy where he has been spending a month in Assisi. Asher has a love of history which animates this post. 

In my last post I detailed my trip from South Africa to Italy, my arrival in Assisi, and the beginning of my Italian classes. Here, however, I wish to relate the first couple of visits I was able to make to some of the sites around town and in so doing tell the story of this place, which is surely a detailed and intricate one. 

The first visit I made in Assisi was to the Rocca Maggiore, a large imposing fortress on the heights surrounding the town. This tour was with a man named Marco, a local tour guide who on Wednesdays takes the academy students to a particular sight and explains the history and significance—in Italian, of course. 

The original fortress would likely have been built sometime in the early Middle Ages, and it is believed that Frederick Barbarossa came through that building during his conquest of Assisi, which occurred in 1174. Barbarossa was of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, a German royal family that ruled the Habsburg empire for centuries in the High Middle Ages. They had many notable run-ins with the Pontiffs at that time, even though in a fundamental sense the Holy Roman Emperor was seen as carrying forth the standard of Christian temporal power, while the Pope held the spiritual influence. However, like most things that are meant to work symbiotically, the reality was often much more complicated. In fact, Frederick Barbarossa’s incursion into Italy in which he took Assisi, was part of a larger effort to retake much of the peninsula and bring it out from under Papal domination, thus bringing him into direct conflict with Pope Alexander III. This conflict took the form in Italy of the continual clash between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, two rival factions that supported the Pope and the emperor respectively. In fact, in Dante’s famous Commedia Divina, that particular political struggle is referenced quite often. Of course Dante was not from Assisi, but from Florence, and by his time, the Guelphs had successfully driven the Ghibellines from their city. This left an internal conflict between two factions that came to be known as the White and Black Guelphs, who fought each other almost as fiercely as the Ghibellines had. The Black Guelphs stood in favor of very strong temporal power for the Pope, while the White Guelphs (to whom Dante belonged) believed in a more tempered prerogative that restricted some of the Pope’s earthly power. By the time the Commedia was written, the White Guelphs had been defeated, and Dante had been driven from the city as an exile, which explains much of his bitterness and yet pining fondness for his city, as well has his acid revulsion toward the Black Guelphs. 

However, to return to the Rocca Maggiore, the version that Frederick Barbarossa likely saw is not the version one would see today as it was destroyed in a popular uprising in 1198. And there it lay, destroyed with no need for it to be rebuilt until 1356, when it was rebuilt by a churchman named Cardinal Albornoz. Albornoz also had another fort, the Rocca Minore (of course, smaller) built some distance away from the first with a rock wall connecting the two. 

The reason for this updated construction was that Albornoz, a Spaniard by birth, was acting on behalf of the Pope, at that time the Avignon Pope Innocent VI. Innocent was engaged in a struggle with his rival, Giovanni di Vico, who claimed to be the Bishop of Rome, and hence the Pope. Since Church law does not allow for two men to be Pope at once, the reason for the war between them should be self-evident.  The Cardinal came to win support for the Pope-in-exile’s cause, and, having obtained the backing of the Archbishop of Milan and the bishops of Florence and Pisa, he set about fortifying the region and solidifying the Pope’s position, including building the Rocca Maggiore that still stands today. 

Upon arriving at the Rocca Maggiore, we were able to walk through its narrow corridors and small slit windows through which the archers could fire with a reasonable hope of being enough protected as to prevent being struck in return. The small spiraling staircase to the upper tower was steep, uneven, and dizzying enough to give any Medieval knight’s tower a run for its money. At the top, overlooking the city, we were rewarded with a beautiful view, though the rainy, overcast, windy, and (if one is being honest) downright chilly spring day rendered the high altitude even severer in temperature than it might otherwise have been. 

After this tour, we walked back down to the Accademy and were able to walk a bit about the city and admire the Calendimaggio which was then just starting. 

I suppose it is about time I explain this Calendimaggio to which I have oft referred and which I have to this point avoided completely elucidating. 

The Calendimaggio is essentially a medieval festival that is celebrated in springtime both to mark arrival of the season and to commemorate the great traditions and competitions typical of yesteryear. In general, across Italy, the competitions take the form of two or more rival factions from the same town which claim to be (and often actually are) bitter rivals that contend for bragging rights for the rest of the year until the next Calendimaggio. 

In Assisi, the two bitterly opposed (well, not quite) factions are the upper and lower parts of town, quite ostentatiously named the Nobilissima Parte di Sopra and the Magnifica Parte di Sotto respectively. 

The two sides actually date back to the Guelph-Ghibelline divide where the Sopra faction was allied with the Ghibellines and the Sotto faction was allied with the Guelphs. The Nepi family were the leaders of the former, and the Fiumi of the latter. 

In the days preceding the competitions, there are many preparations apparent all around town, many of them rather strange to the untrained eye. Street lights are extinguished and replaced with medieval lamps (that are nonetheless LED lit), olive branches are erected to cover up the wires or electrical lines that power the various utilities of the town, and wooden structures are constructed to mimic medieval vendors’ stalls. Overall, it is a great time for the guys to dust off their toolboxes and bond over some such construction project. 

Finally, the festivities begin with a ceremony at San Rufino (sopra) and at San Francesco (sotto) blessing the flags of the two sides. I attended at San Rufino, and it was a beautiful sight, seeing everyone dressed in full medieval getup processing into the Church. There was a short service with a prayer, and then the event was officially begun. 

It seemed that everyone in the village was involved. There were knights with chain mail and boots, great ladies with elaborate headdresses and impractically long trains, great gentlemen with elaborate headdresses and no trains (of course). 

All of the actual competitions were ticketed events, mostly in the Piazza del Commune, but the energy was palpable everywhere. 

One night we were told that we had to abstain from any lights or television for the whole evening because a drama was being held outside our window. It was hosted by the sotto section, and if the surrounding residences did anything arye (that is, accidentally come outside or cause some anachronism such as modern lights), the judge could penalize sotto. This seemed liked a pretty good incentive to get the neighbors to comply since, if they didn’t, they would be taken in hand not so much by any legal body but just by their own fellow neighbors. 

After several days, the celebrations were brought to a conclusion, and it transpired that the sotto part won, which was where I was staying. There was great jubilation in our area, while the sopra section just had to endure another year of defeat and must needs console themselves with the though of, “We’ll get ’em next year!” 

During that first week, the school provided us with another tour which I wanted to speak a bit about. It was to the library of the Franciscans at San Francesco, a place generally only frequented by researchers or friars. Inside are housed various ancient texts, including ones from the time of St. Francis. 

The archivist, a tall Italian friar, explained to us the history of about five or six. One was a hymn book that was created likely during the lifetime of St. Francis. It was important for determining what sort of prayers and what kind of liturgy was practiced in the time of St. Francis. Since books were so expensive in that time, they were only able to have one and would all use it in common. Books at that time required months and sometimes years of labor, tediously stretching animal skin, solidifying it with wax, allowing it to dry, and then painstakingly writing on it in perfect order and without crossing the column barriers. There were professionals called copyists whose job it was to meticulously write down texts, usually from another manuscript. Their reputation was one of meticulous care but likely no comprehension; that is, they likely understood very little of what they were writing. 

He also showed us a book written by a theologian who wrote his own texts. This man, on the other hand, of course understood what he was writing but was likely the only one; his writing was so bad that upon close examination, no one was able to read a word of it from our group. The friar said that there was some expert from Perugia who had spent years working with this medieval theologian’s texts and for whom it was now quite easy to decipher them. However, to the untrained eye, their meaning is quite elusive. 

We also saw a Bible donated by King Louis IX to the Franciscan order. King Louis was someone I spoke about when I was in Paris; he was a saint in his own right and greatly admired the Franciscans. He sent them a Bible as a gift, and quite a valuable gift it was. The friar showed us the heavy, supersized cover and binding and the large pages and then proceeded to tell us that that was only the book of Isaiah. It would have taken months and months, he said, for a copyist to, by himself, put together all the pages necessary for that one volume along. All put together, for the whole Bible, it would take a single person about fifteen years to complete. Certainly the gift of a king. 

The classes continued, and I slowly settled into my routine of Assisian life. Every day I would rotate through the churches I would visit because, of course, there are so many to choose from. My favorite was the Chiesa Nuova, a small, baroque church built over the site of Francis’s house. It is exquisitely decorated, right in the center of town, and yet somehow just out of the way of the crowds. 

In my next post I will speak about my day trip to Florence, the city of Dante. It was my first time there, but nevertheless it was full of great discoveries and misadventures.

To see all of Asher's dispatches from his journey click HERE