Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, September, 1880

by Various

It was indeed! A fine appetite I should have had for my breakfast, at that moment awaiting me, if I had had to reflect over it that the great bell of the great basilica of St. Francis of Asisi had that very morning been cracked into pieces by my fore finger! What visions of horrified crowds of Asisinati, of black storms of newspaper items, of censuring gossip the world over, would have come between me and that purple pigeon smothered in rice which Maria had promised me! The pope himself would have known me individually out of the cloud of his subjects, and have frowned upon my image. And how it would have been whispered behind me to the end of my days, "That is the lady who broke the great bell of St. Francis"! But I had not broken it, and it still hangs sound and strong, to send its melancholy sweet music out to meet the centuries as they roll in storm and sunshine over the eastern mountains. Let us be thankful for the evils which might have happened and did not.

I cannot resist the temptation to relate a little incident concerning this same learned Professor Cristofani, it struck me as so quaint. He is a poor man—literature, and even teaching, do not pay very well in Italian paesi—and he has a family. Cheaply as servants may be employed, he could not afford one, and his wife was not very well. Last summer the Alpinisti visited Asisi, and some of the principal members, having an introduction to him, wished to visit him. Their stay in Asisi was short, and, being sunrise-and-mountain-top people, they made their call at six o'clock in the morning on their way to the top of Mount Asio, from which Asisi takes its name, and, I may here add, the correct spelling of its name, which I have followed. A servant from the Leone Hotel showed the visitors to the house, and very stupidly knocked at the kitchen-door. A loud "Avanti!" from within answered the knock. The door was opened by the guide, revealing a tableau. The professor, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up and an apron tied on, was earnestly kneading a mass of dough preparatory to sending it to the baker's oven, where everybody bakes their bread, and his pretty blonde young daughter was making coffee at the kitchen fire.

"Well, I am a poor man, and my wife was sick," he said afterward, in telling the story, with a sad smile in his eyes, which are as blue and almost as blind as violets.

These stories awaken a laugh only at the time, but gain a certain sublimity when years have gilded them—like that one of St. Bonaventura, which this reminds us of: When the two legates sent by the pope of that time to carry the scarlet beretta of a cardinal to St. Bonaventura set out in search of him, they were obliged to follow him to a little Franciscan convent at a short distance from Florence, where he had retired for devotion and to practise for a while the humble rules of his order. As these two dignified prelates came solemnly around an angle of the building they glanced through the open kitchen-window, and were astonished to see the personage they sought engaged in washing the supper-dishes. He accosted them with perfect calmness, and, learning their errand, requested them to hang the hat in a tree near by till he should have finished washing the dishes. They complied, and the pots and pans and plates having been attended to, the whole community adjourned to the chapel and the saint received the dignity of prince of the Church.

The eight days' festa of Corpus Domini opened in Asisi with one of the most exquisite sights I have ever seen, the procession of the cathedral as it passed from San Francesco through Via Superba on its return to the cathedral. We took our places in a window reserved for us, and waited. There all was quiet and deserted. The air was perfumed by sprigs of green which each one had strewn before his own house. One living creature alone was visible—a little boy who knelt in the middle of the street and carefully placed small yellow flowers in the form of an immense sunflower chalked out on the pavement. Here and there, in some stairway-window, a shrine had been prepared, with its Madonna, lamp and flowers. It was near noon of a bright June day, but the houses were so high that the sun struck only on the upper stories of the north side of the street. All below was in that transparent shadow wherein objects look like pictures of themselves or like reflections in clear water. The whole street was indeed a picture, with its gray houses set in irregular lines, and as distinct in character as a line of men and women would have been. On the building opposite our window was an inscription telling that Metastasio had lived there—on another a date, 1419.

In 1419, when they piled the stones of that wall, Christopher Columbus was not born, yet the basilica of St. Francis had been built more than one hundred and fifty years; and on such a June day as this the Asisinati leaned from their windows to see a Corpus Domini procession come up the street, just as they were now doing. It came through the fragrant silence and clear shadow like a vision. I could not restrain an exclamation of surprise and delight, for I had not dreamed of anything so beautiful. The procession would have been striking anywhere, but shut in as it was between the soft gray of the opposite stone houses, with the green-sprinkled street beneath and the glorious blue above, it was as wonderful as if, looking down into clear deeps of water, one should see the passing of some pageant of an enchanted city buried deep in the crystalline waves centuries ago. There was nothing here but the procession, leisurely occupying the whole street, treading out faint odors without raising a particle of dust. The crowd that in other places always obscures and spoils such a display here followed on behind. The leisureliness of an Italian religious procession is something delicious, as well as the way they have of forming hollow squares and leaving the middle of the street sacred to the grander dignities.

The members of the different societies wore long robes of red, blue or of gray trimmed with red, and had small three-cornered pieces of the material of the robe suspended by a string at the back of the neck, to be drawn up over the head if necessary. The arms of the societies were embroidered on the breast or shoulder, and each one had its great painted banner of Madonna or saint and a magnificent crucifix with a veil as rich as gold, silver, silk and embroidery could make it. There were the white camicie half covering the brown robes of long-bearded, bare-ankled Cappuccini, and sheets of silver and gold in the vestments of the other clergy.

Presently the canopy borne over the Host appeared, with the incense-bearers walking backward before it and swinging out faint clouds of smoke: the voices of the choir grew audible, singing the Pange lingua, and everybody knelt. In a few minutes all was over.

There was a fair in connection with this feast, the most notable part of which was dishes of all sorts set on tables or spread on the grass of the pleasant piazza of St. Peter's, the Benedictine church, with no roof over but the sky. The brown and yellow-green earthenware for kitchen use would have delighted any housekeeper. We bought some tiny saucepans with covers, and capable of holding a small teacupful, for a cent each. Italian housekeepers make great use of earthen saucepans and jars for cooking. One scarcely ever sees tin—iron almost never. In rich houses copper is much used, but brown ware is seen everywhere.

The next notable festa, and the great feast of Asisi, is the Pardon, called variously the Pardon of Asisi, the Pardon of St. Francis and the Porziuncola.