Note: This image was originally uploaded to my PESO gallery. It therefore contains a repeat of some information that is already in the Assisi gallery.

We stayed overnight in a hotel which was described as being in the "Assisi area". It was in fact a Holiday Inn in a town named Foligno. It was a nicer hotel than the name suggests. It was probably not that memorable; outside of this comment I may not remember it in a few years' time but it was comfortable and functional and had a decent breakfast service. I recall that we were able to wash some clothes in the bathroom and hang them up to dry, which was important after that much time on the road, that much hot weather, and staying in hotels would hit you up for €10 EACH just for washing a T-Shirt. (Not that hotel; I don't recall whether they had laundry service, but I saw it more than once in our travels.) The evening meal was pleasant enough though the "dining room" had more the atmosphere of a factory cafeteria than a restaurant, and we could only get soft drinks from the vending machine in reception. Also, the vending machine did not accept notes, so I had to go back upstairs and get the coins out of my trusty photographer's vest. Actually I had forgotten about that until I started to write this commentary.

The reason for this is so that we could strike out for the basilica of St Francis in Assisi first thing the following morning. (Assisi is slightly to the north of Foligno, so we were backtracking.) I went to see the church (the lower basilica, I believe) that contained the crypt and mausoleum of St Francis. No photos were allowed, so you won't find any in this gallery (or any other gallery here). I found that part of the church to be - how can we put it - rather depressing. At some point we lost contact with the tour guide who was supposed to take us to the upper basilica, but I really didn't care. St Francis has never been a particular hero of mine - I have no feelings about him one way or another, I know him only as a historical figure - and so I'm afraid I felt no affinity with this location. I was more interested in seeing the township than another church.

The township itself was not particularly inspiring (but see the 2023 update below) though the view over the valley below was quite beautiful. There was the usual collection of shops and stalls, particularly near the parking bay for the tourist coaches. I did not have the backpack with me, because backpacks are frowned upon (for obvious reasons) at many tourist destinations. I therefore took a messenger bag with me instead. Made from heavy fabric and with metal fittings, it cost me about 80 bucks but I figured it would last a good long time. However at this point I realised that a small, light, formless backpack would be a useful thing to have to go to places where backpacks were not frowned upon. At a market stall here in Assisi I found one for a mere dodici euro (12 Euros, about $AUD18).

You can guess the rest; a clip on that heavy fabric bag failed about two weeks into the trip (though I was able to still jury rig it so that I could still use the bag) but the €12 backpack is still serving me (as of September 2023) and in fact is currently serving as my primary camera gear bag.

I also had to take one of our party to the chemist near the coach stop. She had been having trouble with her eye and needed some drops. The pharmacist spoke no English and hey, I still managed to get her the right stuff. He probably thought that I spoke like Tarzan (my Italian was as rusty as a sunken battleship back then, which I still feel a degree of embarrassment about given my origins), but I still got the message across. In fact this was the third time that I had been in a non-English speaking chemist since the trip started; I was becoming quite an expert by now. Me speak to chemist good, tell him symptoms, get ju-ju juice, me no need correct verb conjugation. Distinguish correct object and subject pronoun, hah, that for wimps.

However that was for later. Here, we passed by Francesco's Olive Oil and Wine Shop which has some words of wisdom for English-speaking tourists attached to the wall. Unfortunately, these words don't quite gel with the fact that we need to be at the meeting point by an exact time and that that exact time was sooner that we might have liked.

Edit September 2023: Rereading the commentary that I had written from a distance of 7 years after, I find that I need to redo part of it because what I feel now is not really what I felt then. I still don't feel any inspiration from the basilica, nor do I have any feelings about St Francis one way or the other. But the bit about the town being "uninspiring" was probably unjustified.

It's still true in the sense that to me Assisi is not inspiring the way Roma is inspiring. But it is a place that I feel in retrospect (and after the 2019 trip) I would like to be in. Not forever, not even necessarily for months or weeks, but for a few days at least. It's a simple town (in a good way), full of history, full of stone houses that could tell the stories of generations upon generations of people. It's a peaceful place where you could stop and think for a while, and just gaze over a tranquil landscape as and when you need to. The words of wisdom that we find at Via Fontebella number 46, outside Francesco's Olive Oil and Wine Shop, have some validity.

If you have the time to spend and slow down, of course. That is always the rub.