Assisi

And the update from Assisi! It was amazing- one of my favorite towns so far. It was one of those small, quaint little towns that has a castle at the top of the hill and the town popping out of the hill around it. Friday night we got there and had dinner, met each other a little bit, and then headed off to have a reconciliation service in the crypt of the church of San Francesco. The picture on the right is what we saw as we walked up there that night. It was really cool because there was a little bit of mist (we later found out that there's pretty much always a little mist!) and the lights shining on the white and pink stone in the basilica made it look like it was almost floating. The reconciliation service was a great way to start off a retreat, and in front of the simple tomb of St. Francis made it even more of an amazing experience.


We went back the next morning to look more at the basilica and tour the upper levels, and the picture on the left shows the tower rising through the fog. The fog sank a bit later in the day, but just below the town- it never actually disappeared. We spent most of the day touring the town and stopping in the various churches, so we saw the church of Santa Chiara, which had her body and some relics in the basement and in a side chapel was the cross of San Damiano which spoke to St. Francis. It was really nice to be able to go into a church and mostly just be able to wander around and pray on your own time- very different from our field trips! Later in the day we went down to San Damiano, which was far enough down the hill that it was in the fog, and just walked through the cloister and the church. It was very simple and bare, and you could almost picture St. Francis rebuiling it.


The next day we spent mostly on Mount Subiaso- where St. Francis spoke to the birds. It was a little place to escape for them, so we decided to go. This meant a lot of heading up, so basically we spent about an hour and a half walking up. The picture on the right is once we got up there- there were a couple of statues marking where Francis slept and there were a couple of other statues of the brothers, so Josie decided to imitate one of them. When we first got there and saw this statue, it was really cool because if you followed where the statue was looking there was a dove on a branch.





This is just a group picture taking a break on the way up the mountain...












And a pretty picture of a path on the mountain...





This was the sunset on the second night, above San Damiano, and the other picture is my favorite- it's the clouds below the city. Absolutely breathtaking!