There’s every chance that Saint Francis of Assisi would be mystified, if not appalled, by the city that is famous because of him.
Lavishly-endowed basilicas, coachloads of tourists and pilgrims swarming around his tomb, the money-making machine that any modern pilgrim site is nowadays. It all represents the antithesis of what Il Poverello – “the little poor man” in Italian – stood for: radical simplicity and humility, and a rejection of “the economic system of calculated wealth”, says Donald Spoto in Reluctant Saint: The Life of Francis of Assisi.
