Free On the Road with Francis of Assisi by Linda Bird Francke Page A

on her. The pig was dead within three days. To further avenge the lamb, the monks threw the sow’s body into a ditch at the monastery, where it “dried up like a board” and did not become “food for any hungry creature.” So much for Sister Sow.
    Francis was far more charitable, in another San Verecondo legend, toward a killer wolf. There are many wolf stories, but the first emanated from that same monk’s medieval text. This quite benign version has a sick and frail Francis riding a donkey at twilight along the road to the monastery and being entreated not to proceed by local farmers because of the “ferocious wolves” in the area. Francis replied that he did not fear “Brother Wolf” because neither he nor his Brother Donkey had done any harm to him, and they completed their journey to San Verecondo intact.
    That same route from Assisi to what is now the Abbazia di Vallingegno may still be in existence today. A network of seven footpaths linking Assisi to the old monastery and beyond, to Gubbio, was opened for the millennium in 2000. Some pilgrims followed all or part of the thirty-mile Sentiero Francescano della Pace on foot, others on horseback.
    I walk the second leg, a beautiful three-mile track downhill from Pieve San Nicolo, a hamlet on a hill four miles north of Assisi, to the tiny two-building locality of Il Pioppi. It was on this leg, which winds through high fields of wild broom and then very steeply down through a forest, that Francis is thought by some historians to have been jumped by the thieves and to have sought refuge at the nearby abbey of Santa Maria Assunta. Others mark the site of the attack near Caprignone, a hill and ditch much nearer to Vallingegno, along the fifth leg of the Sentiero Francescano. Early Franciscans built a monastery and a still-standing church on the top of Caprignone hill to memorialize the event, which would seem to indicate that this was the crime scene.
    Sitting at the picnic table at the Abbazia di Vallingegno and looking out over the valley all the way to Mount Subasio, I wished I had walked farther in Francis’s footsteps along the Sentiero Francescano. I feel somewhat better when, later, an Italian friend who had walked the entire peace trail told me she had gotten hopelessly lost on the section leading to the old abbey.
    She was better off, however, than was Francis during his first, mean stay with the Benedictines at the monastery. “No mercy was shown to him,” Celano says flatly. Half starved and half naked—he had only a peasant shirt, according to Celano, and “wanted only to be fed at least some soup”—Francis was in desperate straits. He soon left the monastery, “not moved by anger but forced by necessity,” and found his way to Gubbio.
    There can be no more beautiful road in Italy than the approach to Gubbio. Up, up from the valley, curving through rough plowed fields, olive groves, then down and up again, through vineyards with neat rows of grapevines tied on triangular wooden frames. Finally, the walled, medieval city appears, tucked into Mount Ingino on the western rim of the already snowcapped Apennines.
    It is the fall truffle season in Gubbio, made clear in the parking lot near the church of San Francesco della Pace by a billboard advertising a two-month-long market and exhibition of
tartufi bianchi,
white truffles. The church is
chiuso
until the late afternoon, so we follow the promise of fresh truffles to Fabiani, a restaurant near the church on the Piazza Quaranta Martiri (so named for the forty “martyrs” of Gubbio shot by the Nazis in 1944), where the truffles, however delicious, are not
bianco
but
negro,
black. White or black, I feel a pang of guilt indulging in the local delicacy, remembering the hunger with which the half-starved Francis arrived here.
    Good fortune reportedly came his way from a merchant family named Spadalonga, who gave Francis the first charity he’d received since he left Assisi—and perhaps even saved his