The Apennine mountains run through the centre of the Italian peninsula. Just north of the centre we find Monte Subasio, which rises 1,290 metres above the province of Perugia in in the region of Umbria. On its western slopes, there is a hilltop town (at an altitude of 424m, so well below the summit) named... Assisi.

Its most famous resident was of course St Francis of Assisi (the former Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, 1181-1226) who founded the Franciscan order of monks (more formally the Order of Friars Minor) in 1209, amongst other orders.

Francis' remains were interred in the Basilica di San Francesco d'Assisi (Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi), one of the most prominent buildings in the town. In theory we were here to see that. In practice I didn't stay there long, being more interested in the rest of the town.

The previous day we had travelled from San Marino, through Urbino and Gubbio amongst other places, and past Assisi to a town to the south of it called Foligno. Foligno is a town of around 57,000 people which is also in Perugia. We stayed at an unremarkable but decent Holiday Inn because the plan was to take us to Assisi at the start and we needed a base close by. (It's 24 minutes away by road.)

The railway station for the town is in a frazione (suburb) called Santa Maria degli Angeli on the plains below the main town. Also located there is the Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli, (seen in some photos in this gallery) inside which you will find the original church (La Porziuncola) in which St Francis found his calling.

After this we would spend most of the day on the road in the coach en route to Napoli. I would guess that we stopped for lunch along the way but annoyingly, I did not take any shots of that if we did. (Mind you, it may have just been one of those roadside service stations that we stopped at on occasion. I still should have shot the experience.)

(Also, for anyone wondering... yes indeed I do still want to dump PBase. So why create a new gallery? It's still useful for test uploading images to check captions, etc, before I upload them on a site where they will be seen by more than 3 people. And where you don't have to manually add your lens type for every freaking image. And where the uploader was written less than 20 years ago and knows what Unicode is.)