There’s every chance that Saint Francis of Assisi, whose Feast Day is today, 4 October, would be mystified, if not appalled, by the town in Umbria that is famous because of him. With lavishly-endowed basilicas, coach loads of tourists and pilgrims swarming around his tomb, Assisi is in many ways a money-making machine that any modern pilgrim site tends to be 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”, writes Donald Spoto in Reluctant Saint: The Life of Francis of Assisi.
