[52] It is perhaps an insult to the Tescio to leave the traveller in Umbria under the impression that this mountain torrent is always dry. Certainly that is its usual condition, but we have seen it during the storms that break upon the land in August and September overflow its banks and inundate the country on either side; but with this wealth of water its beauty goes. [53] The large modern church of Rivo-Torto, on the road from Sta. Maria degli Angeli to Spello, built to enclose the huts that St. Francis and his companions are supposed to have lived in while tending the lepers, has been proved without doubt by M. Paul Sabatier to have no connection whatever with the Saint. In these few pages we have followed the information given in a pamphlet which is to be found in the Italian translation of his _Vie de S. François d'Assise_. It is impossible here to enter into all the arguments relating to this disputed point, but I think the authority of the best, and by far the most vivid of the biographers of St. Francis can be trusted without further comment, and that we may safely believe the hut of St. Francis, known as Rivo-Torto, lay close to the present chapels of San Rufino d'Arce and Sta. Maria Maddalena. See Appendix for information as to their exact position in the plain and the nearest road to them. _Disertazione sul primo luogo abitato dai Frati Minori su Rivo-Torto e nell'Ospedale dei Lebbrosi di Assisi._ di Paul Sabatier (Roma, Ermanno Loescher and Co., 1896). [54] See _The Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy_, vol. xxvii. Nov. 1882. [55] _Speculum Perfectionis_, cap. lv., edited by Paul Sabatier. [56] This custom ceased in the fifteenth century; but in the year 1899, through the piety of the Rev. Father Bernardine Ibald, it was revived. Once again the franciscans take a small basket of fish to the abbot and his monks who now live at S. Pietro in Assisi, where the benedictines went when their mountain retreat was destroyed by order of the Assisan despot, Broglia di Trino.