From the Hill of Hell to the Hill of Paradise

For eight hundred years, pilgrims have climbed a hill at the western edge of Assisi to pray at the tomb of a man who owned nothing.

The hill was once called the Hill of Hell, the place where the town dumped its refuse and executed its criminals. In 1228, two years after the death of St. Francis, a pope laid the first stone of a church there, and the hill was given a new name: the Hill of Paradise.

This is the story of that church, from the day it was begun to the eighth centenary of the saint’s death in October 2026: a story of popes and painters, of Cimabue and Giotto, of a body hidden so well that it was lost for six hundred years and found again by night in 1818, of quarrels over poverty, a friary seized by the state, a town that sheltered Jews in the Second World War, and an earthquake that brought the vaults crashing down in 1997.

Told in clear, modern prose, with Building Notes on how the basilica was made and changed. The first book in Tau Publishing’s series on the holy places of Assisi.