Now the sights of Assisi are not many. If you are in a hurry and do not fall in love with the quaint and picturesque character of it and its wonderful views you can do them all in a day,--an afternoon if you skimp. There is the church of St. Francis with its associated monastery (what an anachronism a monastery seems in connection with St. Francis, who thought only of huts of branches, or holes in the rocks!) with its sepulcher of the saint in the lower church, and the frescoed scenes from St. Francis’s life by Giotto in the upper; the church of St. Clare (Santa Chiara) with its tomb and the body of that enthusiastic imitator of St. Francis; the Duomo, or cathedral, begun in 1134--a rather poor specimen of a cathedral after some others--and the church of St. Damiano, which was given--the chapel of it--to St. Francis by the Benedictine monks of Monte Subasio soon after he had begun his work of preaching the penitential life. There is also the hermitage of the Carceri, where, in small holes in the rocks the early Franciscans led a self-depriving life, and the new church raised on the site of the house belonging to Pietro Bernardone, the father of St. Francis, who was in the cloth business. I cannot say that I followed with any too much enthusiasm the involved architectural, historical, artistic, and religious details of these churches and chapels. St. Francis, wonderful “jongleur of God” that he was, was not interested in churches and chapels so much as he was in the self-immolating life of Christ. He did not want his followers to have monasteries in the first place. “Carry neither gold nor silver nor money in your girdles, nor bag, nor two coats, nor sandals, nor staff, for the workman is worthy of his hire.” I liked the church of St. Francis, however, for in spite of the fact that it is gray and bare as befits a Franciscan edifice, it is a double church--one below the other, and seemingly running at right angles; and they are both large Gothic churches, each complete with sacristy, choir nave, transepts and the like. The cloister is lovely, in the best Italian manner, and through the interstices of the walls wonderful views of the valley below may be secured. The lower church, gray and varied in its interior, is rich in frescoes by Cimabue and others dealing with the sacred vows of the Franciscans, the upper (the nave) decorated with frescoes by Giotto, illustrating the life of St. Francis. The latter interested me immensely because I knew by now that these were almost the beginning of Italian and Umbrian religious art and because Giotto, from the evidences his work affords, must have been such a naïve and pleasant old soul. I fairly laughed aloud as I stalked about this great nave of the upper church--the Abbé was still below--at some of the good old Italian’s attempts at characterization and composition. It is no easy thing, if you are the founder of a whole line of great artists, called upon to teach them something entirely new in the way