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
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