The Giotto cycle
28 frescoes of the saint's life along the Upper Church walls.
Hagai Agmon-Snir ุญฺุงู ุงฺู ูู-ุณููุฑ ืืื ืืืืื-ืฉื ืืจ โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Berthold Werner โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Erin Brierley โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Berry Singer โ 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** โ 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**. โ **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. โ **The Upper Church holds Giotto's cycle**: **28 frescoes** of Francis's life along the side walls โ **with the Scrovegni Chapel, the most important thing he painted**, โ **though the attribution has been academically disputed for a long time**. โ **The Lower Church holds Cimabue, Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti.** โ **The 1997 earthquake destroyed parts and killed four people** โ 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
**A rich merchant's son who gave everything up โ and his message of poverty and kindness to creation crossed the borders of his religion.** โ **His life**: **Francis** (about 1181โ1226) was the son of a **wealthy cloth merchant** in Assisi, **lived a comfortable youth**, then went to war, was captured and fell ill. โ **After an inward change he publicly renounced his father's wealth** โ **stripping off his clothes in the square before the bishop** and handing them back; **and lived afterwards as a beggar**. โ **What he founded**: **the Franciscan order** โ โ **whose radical principle is that the friars own nothing**, individually or collectively, **living by work and alms**; **a direct challenge to a wealthy Church**. โ **What made him universally loved**: **his stance towards nature** โ **the *Canticle of the Creatures*** addresses the sun as brother and the moon as sister, and water, fire and earth besides, โ **one of the earliest texts placing humanity within creation rather than above it**; **and he is patron of ecology**. โ **His famous meeting**: **in 1219, during the Fifth Crusade, he went to Egypt and met the Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil** โ โ **and the encounter ended in peace and mutual respect, and he returned unharmed**; **it is still cited as a model of dialogue**.
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