The Giotto cycle
28 frescoes of the saint's life along the Upper Church walls.
Hagai Agmon-Snir حچاي اچمون-سنير חגי אגמון-שניר — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Berthold Werner — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Erin Brierley — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Berry Singer — CC BY-SA 4.0
**Two churches stacked on one another with a tomb beneath, and twenty-eight Giotto frescoes telling the saint's life** — a World Heritage site and one of the most important churches in Europe. Building began in **1228**, two years after the death of **Francis of Assisi**. ⚠ **It is three levels**: the **Lower Church**, low and dim and Romanesque; the **Upper Church**, tall and light and Gothic; and beneath them the **crypt** with the saint's tomb. ✅ **The Upper Church holds Giotto's cycle**: **28 frescoes** of Francis's life along the side walls — **with the Scrovegni Chapel, the most important thing he painted**, ⚠ **though the attribution has been academically disputed for a long time**. ⚠ **The Lower Church holds Cimabue, Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti.** ⚠ **The 1997 earthquake destroyed parts and killed four people** — and it was restored.
28 frescoes of the saint's life along the Upper Church walls.
A low, dim space with frescoes by Martini and Lorenzetti.
Saint Francis's tomb beneath both churches.
Piazza San Francesco 2, 06081 Assisi, Italy
The Temple of Minerva**A complete Roman temple front of six columns, with a Baroque church behind it*10 minutes walk4.6
Rocca Maggiore**A fortress on the summit above Assisi — and the view from it is the picture of14 minutes walk4.6
Basilica of Saint Clare**A pink-and-white striped church propped by three enormous flying buttresses — 14 minutes walk4.9**A rich merchant's son who gave everything up — and his message of poverty and kindness to creation crossed the borders of his religion.** ✅ **His life**: **Francis** (about 1181–1226) was the son of a **wealthy cloth merchant** in Assisi, **lived a comfortable youth**, then went to war, was captured and fell ill. ⚠ **After an inward change he publicly renounced his father's wealth** — **stripping off his clothes in the square before the bishop** and handing them back; **and lived afterwards as a beggar**. ✅ **What he founded**: **the Franciscan order** — ⚠ **whose radical principle is that the friars own nothing**, individually or collectively, **living by work and alms**; **a direct challenge to a wealthy Church**. ✅ **What made him universally loved**: **his stance towards nature** — **the *Canticle of the Creatures*** addresses the sun as brother and the moon as sister, and water, fire and earth besides, ⚠ **one of the earliest texts placing humanity within creation rather than above it**; **and he is patron of ecology**. ⚠ **His famous meeting**: **in 1219, during the Fifth Crusade, he went to Egypt and met the Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil** — ✅ **and the encounter ended in peace and mutual respect, and he returned unharmed**; **it is still cited as a model of dialogue**.