[44] This was a small chapel built for St. Francis by Count Orlando, and must not be confounded with the church of the same name near Assisi.
[45] The earnest wishes of the saint are to this day carried out by faithful friars who, even through the terrible winter months, live at La Vernia, suffering privation and cold with cheerfulness. At midnight a bell calls them to sing matins in the chapel of the Stigmata connected with the convent by an open colonnade, down which the procession files, following a crucifix and lanterns. When the service has ceased, the monks flit like ghosts behind the altar while the lights are extinguished and in the gloom comes the sound of clashing chains. For an hour they chastise themselves: then the torches are relit, the chanting is resumed, and calmly they pass down the corridor towards their cells. Moonlight may stream into the colonnade across the dark forms, or gusts of wind drive the snow in heaps before them, but the chanting is to be heard, and the monotonous cries of ora pro nobis break the awful solitude of night throughout the year upon the mountain of La Vernia.
[46] Here reference is made to the Portiuncula, near Assisi.
[47] The Sasso Spicco, which still can be seen at La Vernia, is a block of rock rising high above the mountain ridge, and seems to hang suspended in the air. It forms a roof over dark and cavernous places where St. Francis loved to pray, often spending his nights there with stones for his bed.
[48] The Fioretti relates that once while St. Francis was praying on the edge of a precipice, not far from the spot where he had received the Stigmata, suddenly the devil appeared in terrible form amidst the loud roar of a furious tempest. St. Francis, unable to flee or to endure the ferocious aspect of the devil, turned his face and whole body to the rock to which he clung; and the rock, as though it had been soft wax, received the impress of the saint and sheltered him. Thus by the aid of God he escaped.
[49] Speculum Perfectionis, cap. c., edited by Paul Sabatier.
[50] St. Francis composed this verse later on the occasion of a quarrel which arose between the Bishop of Assisi and the Podestà. The last couplet was added at the Portiuncula while he was on his death-bed.
[51] It has sometimes happened that visitors, who have not read their Murray with sufficient care, thinking "Le Carceri" are prisons where convicts are kept, leave Assisi without visiting this charming spot. "Carceri" certainly now means "prisons," but the original meaning of the word in old Italian is a place surrounded by a fence and often remote from human habitation.
[52] It is perhaps an insult to the Tescio to leave the traveller in Umbria under the impression that this mountain torrent is always dry. Certainly that is its usual condition, but we have seen it during the storms that break upon the land in August and September overflow its banks and inundate the country on either side; but with this wealth of water its beauty goes.
[53] The large modern church of Rivo-Torto, on the road from Sta. Maria degli Angeli to Spello, built to enclose the huts that St. Francis and his companions are supposed to have lived in while tending the lepers, has been proved without doubt by M. Paul Sabatier to have no connection whatever with the Saint. In these few pages we have followed the information given in a pamphlet which is to be found in the Italian translation of his Vie de S. François d'Assise. It is impossible here to enter into all the arguments relating to this disputed point, but I think the authority of the best, and by far the most vivid of the biographers of St. Francis can be trusted without further comment, and that we may safely believe the hut of St. Francis, known as Rivo-Torto, lay close to the present chapels of San Rufino d'Arce and Sta. Maria Maddalena. See [Appendix] for information as to their exact position in the plain and the nearest road to them. Disertazione sul primo luogo abitato dai Frati Minori su Rivo-Torto e nell'Ospedale dei Lebbrosi di Assisi. di Paul Sabatier (Roma, Ermanno Loescher and Co., 1896).