This weekend I went to Assisi, where Saint Francis is from, which is one of my very favorite places to be in the whole world. I went alone because I feel confident in my abilities to speak Italian and travel well, and because I know this area anyway. This is a good little practice trip for when I take a big solo trip at the end of April for a week all around Italy and France and Switzerland.
There is something to be sad for traveling all by yourself. I was thinking today that the first time I came to Italy, I traveled alone a little, but I only went as far as here in Assisi, which is only 20 minutes away from Perugia in the train. This time I had to take a 2 and a half hour train from Ferrara, change trains in Arezzo, and then another 2 hours in the train to Assisi.
While on the train Friday, I had a remarkable experience that I want to remember always. I was on a regional train from Ferrara to Arezzo and I was in a compartment with another girl when we stopped in Bologna to pick up more people. A couple and a mother with her son, Jacabo, who was about four years old, joined us
Jacobo was a hilarious little ball of energy and he made a point of being friends with anyone he met. He was wearing a little hand-knitted blue and yellow sweater and wouldn’t keep his shoes on even though his mom kept telling him to do so. Everyone shared food with him, like little pies and orange slices, and candy. He had a stick that he had carved himself and he kept brandishing it at everyone in the compartment as though he was a pirate. The couple was two young people who put up with him very well. I started to take out my headphones and listen to the conversation, and the young man picked up on my listening and asked me in English, “Where are you from?”
I automatically responded in Italian, which made everyone really excited. Jacobo decided to show off his own English skills and asked me, “What is your name?” and I said, “Coleen.” But he didn’t understand that “Coleen” was a name and he got very confused. Poor little guy. Then he noticed my ipod and asked to listen. “Watch out,” I warned him, “All the songs are in English!” He liked them anyway and started to dance around the compartment.
When we got to the Florence station Jacobo and his mother had to leave, but she gave me her card and asked me to call her any time I was in Bologna and she would cook for me and give me a place to stay if I wanted. I was left in the compartment with the couple.
We talked about everything for another hour and a half until we arrived at Arezzo. They wanted to know all about New York and Colorado and Texas, and how people see Italians there. They thought that Americans see Italians really badly, but I explained that half the people from the States it seems have Italian blood and also everyone loves the food! They seemed so excited to hear that, especially since they thought we saw Italians as only Mafiosi and Mammoni.
They both told me multiple times, “Me tu sei veramente brava in italiano” which means, “But you’re really good at Italian!” They said that I have very little American accent when I speak and that everyone would be able to understand me. They couldn’t believe (like I can’t believe) that I had learned the language so quickly. “Quando torni negli Stati-Uniti,” diceva la ragazza. “A maggio,” ho detto e poi lei ha detto, “Wow, c’e’ ancora piu tempo per imparare, e quindi quando torni sarai capace di parlare veramente…come una italiana!”
(“When are you going back to the States,” the girl was saying. “In May,” I said and then she said, “Wow, there’s still more time to learn, and so when you go back you will be able to really speak, like an Italian!”)
And then I arrived in Arezzo and had to change trains. Valentina gave me her email address and asked me to please send her a note when I am in Rome in April with Michael, so that she can tell us where to eat and what cool, not-usually-for-tourists things we can see. And then I was on the train to Assisi in the fading light. We passed Perugia and I got all excited because I could see the main Piazza which was where I lived for a while two summers ago. Everyone else on the train was commuting, and so I looked at little foolish being so excited.
I arrived in Assisi, and the woman from the Bed and Breakfast was waiting at the train station for me! I got into the car and she said, “Do you mind if we stop at the store for some mozerella before we go home?” So we went. And then she drove me around the town for a half an hour pointing out where to go and how to take the bus and making sure I knew where to eat and how to get home. We came to her house (which was gorgeous by the way, all wooden accents and floors and HUGE) and she introduced me to her husband and showed me to my room.
It turned out I could be an internet pirate and use someone else’s wi-fi while there, and so I was able to do homework and talk to my family and Michael! And the room had a stand-up shower, which I used to the fullest extent because I hadn’t had a standing-up shower in TWO MONTHS! It was awesome.
I woke up on Saturday early, and went out to have breakfast. The husband brought me some coffee and milk, and made sure I knew how to cut the yummy coffee cakes that they had set out for me. And then he gave me a ticket for the bus that he had laying around, and I set off for my day in Assisi.
There is a huge Bascillica here, down in the lower part of the town where I was staying, built in the 1500s around a tiny little church that was made by the fransiscans on the site of St. Francis’ death. It is strange because the huge church around it is baroque and eleaborate and massive, but the original church is tiny and made of normal rocks. There is a special dispensation from the Catholic church for those who come to the tiny church on pilgrimage. If you go inside the tiny church and say an Our Father and a Credo, and then go to confession and Mass, then return and say an Our Father, a Hail Mary, and a Glory Be, you get what the church calls a “plenary indulgence.” That means that all sins are taken away and you will no longer be sent to purgatory.
I’m not sure I believe in any of that, especially since I don’t believe you need a priest to confess to and I don’t believe in purgatory, so I was planning on just going into the little church and praying a bit and then going on my way. But as I was walking around in the church grounds I stumbled right into the procession at the beginning of a Mass. So I decided to stay. And what was the reading from the Gospel? The Parable of the Prodigal Son.
So I ended up doing the plenary indulgence! And afterward I walked up to the bus stop and took the bus to the town itself on the hill. I got off at the stop for San Damiano, which is the convent of St. Clare where she lived and died and where there are still soure di closure (cloistered nuns). They have the crucifix there that spoke to St. Francis and told him to rebuild the Church at the start of his life as a holy man. The crucifix is as vibrant and clear as if it were made yesterday, but it is in fact nearly a thousand years old.
To get to San Damiano, you have to walk a kilometer from the bus stop. On the way back, it is all up a very steep hill, but there are beautiful olive trees everywhere and the countryside is peaceful. An amazing thing about olive trees…the trunk may have holes in it and the whole bottom of the tree will seem for all intents and purposes completely dead, but then at the top there will be beautiful and fruitful branches.
I hiked from San Damiano up to the town itself and went along the street to the Bascillica of Santa Chiara, where her body was buried. I went inside a bar outside the church because I was dying for some coffee and water, and then I went into the church and saw the relics of St. Clare and St. Francis, which are kept in the same place because they were very close friends, or according to some even kind of married. I think it’s incredibly romantic to think that they would have been in love and I don’t think that would get in the way of them being saints and holy. They were just people like anyone else, and I’d hope that they found a soulmate just like I hope that for anyone else.
After that, I climbed the town to the top of the mountain, where the castle of the town is (the Rocca Maggiore). There I could see the whole valley and Perugia in the distance, even though it was pretty hazy and hard to see. In the course of the day I would do about 7 miles on foot, with over a thousand feet of elevation change. It was humid and hot and I was tired from hiking, but I went back down and walked along the streets of the town trying to find a specific store.
When I was here last time, the very first time that I ever traveled alone, I went into a store to look at the ceramics. The woman was really nice to me and so excited that I could understand Italian (even though my responses were completely terrible), that she talked to me for ten minutes and gave me a postcard to give to my mother with sunflowers on it. I brought the crucifix that I bought there to my mom and she keeps the postcard on the fridge in our kitchen.
This time I went into her store, and she recognized me! We talked for a while about the ceramics and I bought a little box made by hand. My Italian is much better this time, and she told me about her husband who works as a police officer in Perugia’s drug unit. Apparently last summer, a big dog in the city bit two of his fingers off on his left hand! “Oh, god!” I said, “That’s terrible!” But she said, “No, it’s fine, I mean it could’ve been worse.” She was very cheerful about the whole thing and gave me another sunflowers postcard to take to my mother. “A la prossima volta!” she said and shook my hand as a left (“Until next time!”).
After that I walked down to the Bascillica of St. Francis, which I think is one of the most beautiful churches in the world. I sat down for about an hour and painted a picture of the façade, while a barefooted Franscican in a hair shirt wandered around next to me preaching and collecting money for a mission in the United States. There were so many Americans every that I was getting annoyed with, because they were loud and disrespectful and obnoxiously American (by that I mean expecting everyone to speak English and everything to be exactly like home). They were mostly high schoolers and parents on Spring Break. Ugh.
Apparently I don’t look like one of those Americans anymore. Italians can tell I’m not from here, but until I open my mouth they usually think I’m German. And as I was sitting there I had several annoying touristy Americans come up to me and say very slowly and like I was stupid or something, “Wow…that is very pretty. Do…you…speak…English?” And each time I took off my sunglasses and said, “Yeah, I’m American actually.” Mildly frustrating.
I finished my painting and I had to pee really really badly. Unfortunately for me, although not unusually for Italy, the public restrooms were locked. Damn! This meant that I had to walk down to a pizzeria and ask for a slice, eat it as quickly as possible (actually I didn’t even sit down, I just took the pizza and ate it right in front of the cashier to the affronted looks of the owners) and then ask, “Ok, can I use your bathroom now?” and run in there. All of this because it’s rude to use the restroom without buying something first. When I came out of the restroom, barefoot preaching dude was there! He apparently did the same thing I did.
I then went into the church itself and visited St. Francis’ tomb again. I had picked some flowers on my walk up the mountain, and I put them through the grate and onto the rocks of his tomb. The entire church is covered in frescos by the main artists of the time (meaning right after St. Francis’ death). Giotto, the same guy who painted the Scrovegni Chapel in Padova, did most of the church with the help of his assisitants. The colors are still bright and beautiful, 700 years on. There is also beautiful marblework all over the church, but interestingly, there are stars of David everywhere! All over the church! I’m not sure why, but it was cool.
In the top part of the church, there are more Giotto frescos, which are among the most famous in the world. The one recognized the most is the one with St. Francis preaching to the birds about how awesome God is. And there were three groups, lead by friars, wandering around the church and talking about the paintings. One was in English, one in Italian, and one in French. I wandered between the groups that were being conducted in my three languages…just listening and being grateful I could understand everything. I really liked hearing French, so I stopped and hung out with that group for a couple of minutes. Seeing as I clearly don’t look French, the people in the group kept looking at me like, “Um, what the hell are you doing?” but I was just happy to still be able to understand it.
At this point, I realized that I had caught the cold that is going around our group. My sinuses were pounding and I had a fever, so wandering around in the cold church was aggravating my condition. I walked around asking every friar I could find if they knew where a pharmacy was to buy medicine, but many of them had not left the monastery attached to the church for years and so I had to ask at the information desk. They pointed me back to the main piazza, which was unfortunately about a kilometer away uphill. I resigned myself to walking it, and started off.
When I reached the pharmacy, it was closed! I was so tired and sick feeling that I just went over to the Temple of Minerva, which is a Roman Temple converted now into a church but with the same ancient façade, and sat in the sun trying to figure out what I was going to do for two hours while I waited for the pharmacy to open. I opened my backpack to get my phone and realized not only had I left it at home, but that my paints had exploded inside a bit and paint water was getting on everything.
Ok, no big deal, right? I mean what can you do when these things happen? I needed a plastic bag and fast, though. So I went into the first store I saw, and immediately picked up the cheapest bottle of wine in there. “You want this one?” the lady asked incredulously when I set it on the counter. “Yep! Is it good?” “Um, yeah, sure, whatever you like, “ she answered. But I got my plastic bag and could fix my stupid backpack, so I was happy.
As I left the store, I heard next to me, “Hello, are you American too?” There were three girls sitting on some steps and so I answered them. As usual, I was having trouble transitioning from Italian to English, but they were nice and asked me if I was traveling alone. “That’s really cool,” they said when I answered yes. They were on a day trip from Siena, where they were studying. We commiserated about the study abroad experience and how hard the language can be, and then one of the girls gave me her email and told me to let them know if I was going to be in the Siena area.
After all of that, I still had an hour until I could buy medicine, so I went to the piazza in front of St. Clare’s Bascillica and laid down on a bench in the sun with my backpack tucked under my legs. This is a HUGE faux pas in Italy, because the only people who lay down in public are homeless and it is contrary to the “Bella Figura” (cross between good manners, good appearance, and education). But I didn’t care. My face hurt and I was tired.
Finally after an hour, I went into the pharmacy and asked them to help me because I had a tremendous cold. The ladies were really nice and basically pulled out every type of cold medicine possible and asking me if I was allergic to anything and where it hurt and how old I was, etc etc. They decided on two things, a nasal spray and a decongestant. Pointing to the box of decongestant--“Attenzione, ok?” dise la donna farmacista, “Qui dentro c’e’ ‘sleepy,’ ok?” (“Watch out, ok? The pharmacist lady said, “There’s ‘sleepy’ in here”). The sleepy was in English, and her son started laughing because it was funny to say sleepy when you meant drowsiness. The medicines cost 17 euro, and I was shocked, but I wasn’t about to turn them down.
Outside the pharmacy, I opened the nasal spray and went into an alley to put it in because I was desperate to have some relief. I put the nozzle in my nose and sprayed it, and swore out loud. It burned so badly! And it felt like I had sprayed Vick’s Vapor rub right up my nostril. And then I had to do the other one. I don’t even want to know what the passing Italians thought of me, but after ten minutes of sheer pain my sinuses did start to feel better.
At this point the sun was getting low, and so I walked down to the square where the buses leave from. A bus came and I was so exhausted that I just got on the bus and rode it all around the town, up to where I had climbed in the morning and to the very town of the town. On our way back down, we made a sudden stop and I thought we were going to hit a tree head on. It turned out we were stopping to pick up a couple, and I heard the man who was wearing shorts and a fanny pack and looked like Grandpa with his glasses speaking to the bus driver in English. Surely only an American would do that, I thought, and I got up and went to sit near them and started talking to them, which I would like to point out is something that I would never do at home…just walk up to strangers and start talking to them.
I asked them where they were from, and discovered I had completely misjudged their accents. They were Irish! And now I was really in trouble because I was having a hard enough time understanding American English. They were visiting Assisi from Dublin because their son was studying in Rome. We talked about how awesome it was to study abroad and about my family and how I’m Irish too. We got to the station down the hill from town and they had to leave.
The woman, who was wearing a leopard-print scarf wrapped around her shoulders grabbed my arm and hand and said, “Good luck with everything and God Bless you. Here’s a prayer for you.” She handed me a prayer card for St. Francis, with the most famous fransican prayer on it, the “Make me an instrument of your peace” one. I’ve always liked how much the Irish love to bless people.
I got home and the couple welcomed me back. “Sei stanca? Vuoi un po’ di caffe’ o un the?” (“Are you tired? Would you like some coffee or tea?”) The woman proceeded to make me a cup of tea with lemon and sugar, and to feed me a bunch of sweets until I couldn’t eat anymore. We talked about the day and about what I do in the States, and about my family. The husband was working on hanging up things in the kitchen, and he kept asking me where to hang the new tapestries. They were so nice to include me in their lives.
Then they hustled me up to bed and I called Michael and my family. I spent the night laying down and trying to rest, and took another fantastic standing-up shower. I noticed in the mirror that I look very skinny, maybe even as skinny as I was my freshman year. I’ve lost a lot of weight in my face especially. I decided to make something for the couple to leave at their house, because they had been so kind. I painted a picture of St. Francis and wrote on the back:
“Grazie per tutto! Riccordero’ sempre il mio tempo passato qui, e raccomandero’ il Bed and Breakfast San Francesco in Assisi ad ogni dei miei che verra’ nel futuro.Baci ed amore sempre- Coleen Monroe”
“Thanks for everything! I will always remember my time spent here, and I will recommend the San Francesco in Assisi Bed and Breakfast to any of mine who will come here in the future.
Kisses and love always-Coleen Monroe”
I woke up in the morning and went to have breakfast. When I paid for my stay, the couple gave me a bunch of gifts (magnets, keychains, a pen) and I said that I had made something for their house. I gave them the painting and they said, “Wow, not only and anthropologist but also an artist!” And the husband gave me a big hug and a kiss on the cheek as a left. His wife took me to the train station in their car and said, “Well, bye! Good wishes on everything and live well!”
I went into the station and sat on a bench to write this blog. Just as my train was arriving, all the bells in the city began to ring joyfully and loudly, like Assisi was saying goodbye to me. I climbed onto the train with tears in my eyes because I just wanted to stay there forever, and I watched as the city faded into the hills. I blew kisses at Assisi and watched the countryside roll by on my way back to Ferrara.
I have a new goal in life. I want to retire after whatever I end up doing after college, go somewhere pretty, and own and operate a Bed and Breakfast so that I can repay the kindness of the couple who took me right in.
