Here it is, the shortest walk of the trip, at least to this point. Yesterday wasn’t much longer on paper, but Assisi is on hills not paper, and who knows how many extra kilometers I banked with my pack on, wandering all over the city. As a consequence, what I had initially imagined as a multi-day vacation was essentially downsized to a half-day, so I set forth this morning with the determination to expend as little energy as possible. This is, fortunately, all a rather preemptive maneuver; my health has been impeccable. I haven’t even considered popping an ibuprofen at any point on this trip; my athletic tape, bandaids, and body glide have all gone untouched. It’s a clean sheet. Still, fifty straight days of walking (sure, there was that “off day” in Rome that still involved six hours of pack-walking) inevitably has to put some strain on a body, and there’s plenty more to be done.
My primary reflection on the walk is that I would have thoroughly enjoyed doing it in reverse and having this serve as my arrival route into Assisi. I used this example at one point in my US walk, but I can’t help myself–I’m going back to the well again, and it’s even more relevant now. My favorite Italian literary work, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, features this description of a fictional place called Despina:
“Despina can be reached in two ways: by ship or by camel. The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea.
“When the camel driver sees, at the horizon of the tableland, the pinnacles of the skyscrapers come into view, the radar antennae, the white and red wind-socks flapping, the chimneys belching smoke, he thinks of a ship; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off, with the breeze already swelling the sails, not yet unfurled, or a steamboat with its boiler vibrating in the iron keel; and he thinks of all the ports, the foreign merchandise the cranes unload on the docks, the taverns where crews of different flags break bottles over one another’s heads, the lighted, ground-floor windows, each with a woman combing her hair.
“In the coastline’s haze, the sailor discerns the form of a camel’s withers, an embroidered saddle with glittering fringe between two spotted humps, advancing and swaying; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wine-skins and bags of candied fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself at the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea, toward oases of fresh water in the palm trees’ jagged shade, toward palaces of thick, whitewashed walls, tiled courts where girls are dancing barefoot, moving their arms, half-hidden by their veils, and half-revealed.
“Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes; and so the camel driver and the sailor see Despina, a border city between two deserts.”
Each of the places Calvino imagines in Invisible Cities speaks to some sort of truth about travel, geography, or urban life, but this one has stuck with me as I’ve encountered more places on foot, as opposed to via car or train. The perception is fundamentally altered based on that mode of arrival. In the case of Assisi, the entry point also carries significant implications. Entering Assisi yesterday via the high-level route from Spello, I was struck by how quiet and empty the town was. I came in, essentially, through the backdoor, looping down into the duomo’s piazza from behind. The whole piazza was empty; there was a somnambulatory mood to the place, with only the occasional sightseer ambling past. I bought a calzone and sat in the square for a bit, then drifted up to the castle. A garden bar offered views of the duomo rooftop, and nowhere in any of this did I experience more than a few other people. Eventually, I worked my way down into what proved to be the main part of town, and the central piazza was absolutely swarming with young students. Still, though, the Basilica di San Francesco sat even further away, as far as possible from where I arrived, and by the time I finally descended into the crypt to pay my regards to Francis, I had already been in Assisi for hours. It was the last sight I encountered, or even saw, over the course of my visit.
By contrast, as I departed the town this morning, I had cause to continue turning back, looking over my shoulder, to see the castle high above and the basilica just below, a guiding light for pilgrims walking in from La Verna from far away. Had I taken this route into Assisi, it would have been the first point of arrival, the singular fixture of my attention, the homing beacon towards which every step would have been oriented. I don’t regret my approach, but I also can’t deny something extra special about this different route to Francis, and I envied what the eleven pilgrims I passed along the trail had to look forward to.
Once the basilica passed permanently out of sight, my mind turned to a question: is there any Catholic saint with a higher approval rating than Francis? When I arrived in Valfabbrica, my destination for the day, where I pulled off the most exhilarating feat of the trip–guessing a wifi password on my first try–I googled “saint francis problematic,” just to see what grievances have been aired in his direction. Sure enough, even this peaceful man didn’t emerge unscathed from the Internet. He glorified poverty, some complain, and I acknowledge I’ve found the representation of his views on this subject to be somewhat uncomfortable from a modern vantage point. Some are critical of him as a theologian, finding his ideas to be simplistic and impractical, and hey, fair enough.
What’s interesting, though, is that if there’s an obvious challenge to Francis, the call is coming from inside the house. Walking around Assisi, a curious intrusion has pushed its way into the displays of souvenir shops, a Harry Styles-esque visage that seems utterly out of place. This is no mere celebrity sighting, though, this is the face of the youngest Catholic saint, Carlo Acutis. Known as the “millennial saint,” his canonization will take place on April 27, a week after Easter. Acutis’s body currently rests–wearing jeans and sneakers (in other representations, he’s often seen in a red polo shirt with a backpack)–in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, where Francis renounced his wealth 800 years ago. Acutis was born into a secular family, but he was drawn to faith, first popping into churches independently to see Jesus and Mary, and later attending mass independently. He was drawn most of all to Francis, though, often voluntarily giving up his money and goods to support the homeless, and later asking to be buried in Assisi.
In an AP article, Rev. Enzo Fortunato explained that the connections go even deeper, even if it feels like a bit of a stretch: “And there are more similarities with St. Francis. St. Francis left the churches and went to the squares to preach. Carlo Acutis prophetically realized that today the public squares are online, on the Web. That’s where youth are, that’s where people are, so he lives and brings the Gospel in those squares. That’s one of the reasons why he will become the patron of the Web, Internet and social media.”
Yes, we now have a Patron Saint of the Internet. Pour one out for Carlo Acutis, everyone. What an impossible job.
Acutis died at age 15 from leukemia, only three days after being diagnosed. His most significant accomplishment, in the eyes of many, was the creation of an online exhibition of Eucharistic miracles in the world, which has been installed in over 10,000 parishes worldwide. You can find it here.
If I suspect Francis would be horrified by much of what today exists in Assisi related to his legacy, I also expect that he would be very pleased to be joined in community by Carlo Acutis, who seems to exemplify selfless love and adoration of the gospels, who is fondly remembered by one friend by “his custom of sitting down to chat with anyone who looked lonely, ‘since even a ciao is important for those who are alone.” At first glance, when I saw the headlines involving a “millennial saint,” I thought it smacked of an aging church grasping for relevance, but even if that’s the case, they managed to snag a good one.
