How Assisi was built and evolved over time

A church built into a hillside, twice over

The Basilica of San Francesco is the most instructive building in Umbria, and the thing to grasp is that it is two complete churches stacked vertically against a slope, with a crypt beneath them both. Work began in 1228, two years after Francis died and in the year of his canonisation, and finished in 1253.

The site was called the Colle d'Inferno, the hill of hell, because it was where the town executed criminals — chosen deliberately, in keeping with everything Francis had stood for, and then buried under one of the most ambitious buildings in thirteenth-century Italy. The slope made the two-level design necessary: an enormous substructure of arches and buttresses holds the whole thing against the hillside, and the lower level, originally the undercroft, became a church in its own right.

The two churches, and why they look nothing alike

The Lower Church is Romanesque in feeling — low, broad, dim, heavily vaulted, with side chapels added over the following century. It is a space for being close to the tomb. The Upper Church is early Italian Gothic: a single tall nave with large windows, built to be filled with light and with people, and designed from the outset as a surface for painting. One building, two architectural arguments, and the chronological distance between them is almost nothing.

Pink stone from the mountain behind

The whole town, basilica included, is built from the pale limestone of Monte Subasio, quarried from the mountain it stands on. That is why Assisi reads as a single material from the plain and why it turns distinctly rose-coloured in low sun. It is also a Franciscan fact of a kind: the building material came from the ground the order's founder walked on.

The Roman layer

Underneath is a Roman town. The Temple of Minerva stands on Piazza del Comune with its six columns and pediment intact — the most complete Roman temple facade in Umbria — and it survives for a specific reason: it was converted into a church instead of being demolished for stone. The square itself sits on the Roman forum, parts of which can still be visited below ground level.

1997, and what reconstruction means

On 26 September 1997 an earthquake of magnitude 5.5 brought down sections of the Upper Church vault. Four people were killed and a fresco by Cimabue was destroyed — shattered into fragments too numerous to reassemble meaningfully. Restoration took two years and was technically remarkable, but the distinction matters: the vault was rebuilt, and the painting on it was not recovered. Some of what is overhead today is new work. It is the clearest reminder available that these buildings are not permanent by default.