A Basket of Fish, Volume One

“I want to send you all to Paradise.” — Francis at the Porziuncola, 1216

In the oak woods below Assisi stood a chapel so small and so neglected that its owners, the Benedictine monks of Monte Subasio, had all but forgotten it. Its name meant the little portion. Around 1207 a young man from the town came down through the trees with stones in his hands and began to mend it.

For the next twenty years the Porziuncola was the heart of everything Francis of Assisi began. Here he heard the Gospel that sent him out barefoot. Here his first brothers came to him, and here Clare gave her life to God by torchlight on Palm Sunday night. Here he paid his rent each year with a basket of fish, so that no one could ever say the place was his. Here he asked the pope for a pardon free to all. And here, in October 1226, he asked to be laid on the bare earth to die.

Drawing on the earliest witnesses, and taking care to separate what they saw from what later legend added, Volume One tells the story of the little portion from its beginnings to the night Francis died. The third book in Tau Publishing’s series on the holy places of Assisi.