Assisi historical timeline

Assisi's history is unusual in having a single hinge. It was a modest Roman town and then a modest medieval one, and then one man born here in the twelfth century changed what the place was for permanently. Everything before Francis is prologue; everything after is consequence, including the building that made the town one of the most important sites in European art.

Chronology

1. 295 B.C. — Rome defeats the Umbrians and in time establishes the municipium of Asisium on the hillside. The Roman town gives Assisi its street alignment and its forum, which is still the main square. The Temple of Minerva on Piazza del Comune survives complete, because it was converted to a church rather than demolished — the most intact Roman temple facade in Umbria.
2. 238 — The town is converted to Christianity by the bishop Rufino. He gives his name to the cathedral, which is where both Francis and Clare were later baptised — a detail that matters, because it means the two founders of the Franciscan movement came from this parish rather than to it.
3. c. 1181 — Francis is born in Assisi, the son of a prosperous cloth merchant. His early life is conventional for his class: trade, money and a spell as a soldier, including capture and imprisonment in the war with Perugia. Nothing about it predicts what follows.
4. 1208 — Francis founds his order. The decision to live in absolute poverty, outside the structures of both commerce and the established Church, is the event the rest of Assisi's history depends on. Clare joins him shortly after and founds the Order of Poor Clares, whose community at San Damiano becomes the movement's other half.
5. 1226 — Francis dies at the Porziuncola, the small chapel on the plain below the town that he had restored and made the order's home. The chapel still stands, now entirely enclosed inside the much larger basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli built around it — a building inside a building, which is the clearest physical statement of the order's trajectory.
6. 1228 — Work begins on the Basilica of San Francesco, two years after his death and in the same year he is canonised. It is built against the hillside on two levels, with his tomb beneath. The speed and the scale are the point: a man who preached poverty is commemorated with the most ambitious building the town has ever attempted.
7. 1253 — The basilica is completed. Over the following decades its walls are frescoed in a campaign that becomes one of the founding works of Western painting, marking the shift from Byzantine convention towards observed, physical, human figures. Cimabue works here. The attribution of the Upper Church cycle remains a genuine scholarly dispute.
8. 13th–16th centuries — Assisi spends the later Middle Ages as a small hill town caught between larger neighbours, repeatedly fought over with Perugia twelve miles away, and eventually absorbed into the Papal States. The lack of subsequent wealth is why the medieval town survives: nothing came along with the money to replace it.
9. 1860 — Papal rule ends and Assisi becomes part of the Kingdom of Italy. Its significance by then is entirely religious rather than political, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries see it grow as a pilgrimage destination rather than as a town.
10. 1939 — Francis is proclaimed a patron saint of Italy, which fixes 4 October, his feast day, as a national occasion and the largest single day in the Assisi year.
11. 26 September 1997 — An earthquake of magnitude 5.5 strikes. Part of the Upper Church vault collapses, killing four people and destroying a fresco by Cimabue. Restoration takes two years. The loss is permanent rather than repaired, and it is the reason some of what a visitor sees above is reconstruction.
12. 2000 — UNESCO inscribes Assisi, the Basilica of San Francesco and Other Franciscan Sites under cultural criteria i, ii, iii, iv and vi. Five criteria including the first is an unusually broad listing, and it reflects that the inscription is not about one church: it covers the town and the sites around it as a single Franciscan landscape.