Assisi Birthplace Seeks Restoration Funds

“Francis, you see my house is falling apart, so why don’t you restore it?” Jesus chided, and the rich man’s son forsook his wealth for a life of service and gentle communion with nature.

Eight centuries after Francis of Assisi received the message from a crucifix in a tiny chapel, his birthplace is hearing another appeal for restoration. This one involves paint, plaster and a possible cost of $270 million.

Refurbishing of this town in the Umbrian hills would start with seven of its 122 churches and monuments, including the 13th-Century basilica graced by Giotto frescoes and works by Cimabue.

It is one of the more ambitious and unusual restoration projects in Italy, where palaces and churches are being renovated everywhere.

Restoration usually concentrates on the most visible and popular, with corporate sponsors seizing every opportunity for publicity. The Trevi Fountain in Rome, for example, was cleaned with money from an insurance company.

Renewing Assisi involves less glamorous work on less familiar monuments, such as strengthening the columns that ring the cloister of St. Damian’s Sanctuary, where Francis is said to have heard the crucifix speak.

In the basilica, repairs will be made to the walls covered by Giotto’s 28 frescoes, which recount the saint’s life. The frescoes themselves were restored in the 1980s, after being damaged by an earthquake. One aim of the project is to make the saint’s birthplace more quake-resistant.

Assisi, a town of 4,000 residents, shudders under the stress of 4 million visitors a year. Tour buses lumber up the narrow, winding streets, belching corrosive, blackening exhaust.

Some museums in Italy now limit the numbers of tourists admitted, but that is almost unthinkable in Assisi, where most visitors are religious pilgrims.

The Franciscans, who planned the restoration project along with their sister order, the Poor Clares, see the entire town as a monument to their founder.

“Franciscans who live in daily contact with the signs and art of St. Francis . . . realize that sporadic and partial restorations are no longer enough to preserve such a huge patrimony of history and art,” Sister Chiara Cristiana Stoppa said at a ceremony opening the fund drive.

“There’s nothing grandiose, nothing that attracts publicity” in the plan for the sanctuary where Jesus spoke to Francis, said Father Giulio, as the Franciscan who runs St. Damian’s prefers to be called.

Father Giulio has tried for years to raise money to preserve the wooden dining room tables believed to have been used by St. Clare, founder of the Poor Clares, in the early 13th Century.

Father Nicola Giandomenico, vicar of the basilica convent, said the Franciscans will be cautious about sponsor advertising.

“We can’t have an IBM putting up a sign on the basilica,” he said, “but there could be a book or a video about the restoration.”

St. Clare’s church, which many tourists skip because it is at the far end of town from the basilica, is in sore need of restoration.

Wind rushed through broken upper windows of the church, which overlooks a hillside of silvery-leafed olive trees. A winter fog obscured zigzag cracks in the flying buttresses that support the walls of pink-and-white stone.

A nun designated to talk with visitors, but not to give her name, knew Francis told his disciples to be wary of benefactors--rich churches in his day, big corporations now.

“But poor is one thing, dangerous is another,” said the nun, a Poor Clare for 35 years.

She pointed to chunks of stone the size of bread loaves that had broken from a cornice over a courtyard.