Day 24: Assisi

Assisi, with no doubt in my mind, was my favorite place in Italy and is in very close running to be my favorite place in the world. In some places, beauty is found in the people, sometimes found in the landscape, sometimes found in the culture, or sometimes a combination of all these. Assisi falls into that final category.  Our first experience in Assisi was accompanied by two little Italian nuns. We asked them a simple question, do you know where Hotel Giotto is? Well, one pointed one way..the other pointed the opposite way. Quickly, they went back and forth in competitive banter attempting to convince the other of the direction of the hotel and the insure the other of her stupidity. Ready.....1...2..3...awwwwwww

Approaching Hotel Giotto, we looked out to see a never-ending valley of crop fields and plains...enough said.

Thirdly, the culture. Assisi is a medieval town that it literally stuck in time. It is said that Pompeii is stuck in time, but there is only so much positivity you can attribute to a 2,000 year old city. However, Assisi is stuck in time due to their preservation of their medieval buildings and medieval lifestyle. Okay, the whole medieval lifestyle thing is a stretch. There aren't knights in shining armor  slaying evil forces away from damsels in distress, but a guy can dream about it every once in a while.

Oh, yeah..connections! Well, at Basilica di San Francesco......St. Francis of Assisi's Franciscan Headquarters.....there was a small museum of artifacts/art pieces obtained by the Franciscans through the years. In the far back corner in a rear facing painting, wee see "Madonna Con Bambino" a medieval painting of Mary and Jesus. Nothing too interesting about this painting when speaking of Mary's proxemics to Jesus. However, when we look closely at Jesus, he is wearing a sort of evil eye amulet. Did the medieval culture believe that not even Jesus was free from obtaining the evil eye? Or since a common transmission of the evil eye was through jealousy of babies, Mary knew that she had something special with her, so she put the evil eye amulet on him? Now, as we head to Siena, where more medieval art lies. Allusions to Jesus and the evil eye may pop up. Maybe the amulets will develop as Jesus' age develops. As a baby, Jesus merely has an allusion to a bull horn...which is an allusion to a phallus. There has got to be a more developed amulet out there.