You have a single day for Assisi and you would like to know what is genuinely worth seeing, without ending up rushing from one church to the next with the feeling that you understood none of it?
Assisi is one of those towns where that is exactly the risk. It is small, you can walk across it in half an hour, and precisely because of that it looks easy. Then you step into the Basilica of Saint Francis and realise that on those walls sits one of the moments when European painting changed direction, and that without knowing what you are looking at almost all of it slips past you.
There is one more reason to come now: 2026 marks eight hundred years since the death of Saint Francis, who died in 1226. That means celebrations all year, and also a town far busier than usual.
Shall we make sure you arrive knowing where to look?
Let’s go!
Read also: Giotto: 5 things to know to understand his revolution in painting
Two churches stacked on top of each other
The first thing that throws you is that the Basilica of Saint Francis is not one church, it is two, built one above the other.
Work began in July 1228, at the wish of Pope Gregory IX, just two years after the saint’s death and the day after his canonisation. Consecration came on 25 May 1253 under Pope Innocent IV.
The lower basilica is low, dark, with vaults that press down towards you: it was conceived as a burial place and you can feel it. The upper basilica is the opposite: a single soaring Gothic nave, filled with light from the windows. The jump between the two, if you walk them in sequence, is one of the strongest architectural experiences Italy can offer you.
Why two, though?
Because they served two different purposes. Below, the tomb and private devotion; above, preaching and the celebration of the order. It is a division of labour you read in the space before you read it in any book.
The whole complex, together with the other Franciscan sites in town, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000.
Giotto’s cycle, and the doubt art historians never settled
In the upper basilica, along the nave walls, run the twenty-eight scenes of the Legend of Saint Francis. It is the cycle every art history textbook uses to explain what happens to painting at the end of the thirteenth century.
What happens, concretely? Figures stop floating on gold grounds and start standing inside a space. They have weight, they occupy volume, they turn. The painted buildings have a depth the characters could genuinely walk into. And above all the faces do things: they are startled, they doubt, they weep.
But is it all by Giotto?
The honest answer here is: we do not know for certain. The traditional attribution is to Giotto, and that is what every label will tell you. But a good part of scholarship holds that several masters worked on the site, and that the last scenes belong to another hand, conventionally called the Master of Saint Cecilia. The debate has been open for over a century and has never closed.
Do not let that spoil the visit: whether the hand is one or three, what you are looking at is still the turning point.
Higher up in the right transept there is Cimabue’s Maestà, painted around 1278. Look at it carefully: the colours are in negative. The white lead used for the flesh tones oxidised over the centuries and flipped the lights into darks, turning the faces into a kind of photographic negative. It did not look like this, but this is how it reached us.
The lower basilica: Simone Martini, Lorenzetti and the tomb
Many visitors give the upper church twenty minutes and hurry back down. That is a mistake: the lower basilica holds perhaps the highest concentration of fourteenth-century painting in Italy.
In the chapel of Saint Martin, Simone Martini painted in the 1320s a cycle that is the exact opposite of Giotto: courtly elegance, gold, precious fabrics, a refinement close to French manuscript illumination. In the left transept Pietro Lorenzetti worked instead, with a Crucifixion of a drama you do not see coming. And from around 1307 Giotto’s workshop had a hand in it too, in the Magdalene chapel and the right transept.
A curious detail: the tomb of Saint Francis you visit in the crypt today is a relatively recent discovery. The body had been hidden in 1230 for fear it would be stolen, and the exact spot was lost. It was found again only in 1818, inside a stone sarcophagus beneath the high altar.
The 1997 earthquake, and what it means for what you see
On 26 September 1997 a tremor struck Umbria while an inspection was under way in the upper basilica to assess the damage from the shock of the previous night.
Two sections of the vault collapsed. Four people died: two friars and two technicians. With them roughly a hundred and thirty square metres of medieval frescoes were destroyed, among them Cimabue’s Saint Matthew, reduced to tens of thousands of fragments.
What happened next?
One of the most extraordinary restorations ever attempted: the fragments were collected one by one, catalogued and partly reassembled, in work that looked more like archaeology than conservation. The basilica reopened in 1999.
So when you look up at the vault, you are also looking at this: some areas are reconstructions, some gaps have been deliberately left visible. It is a choice of honesty that, once you know about it, changes how you look at everything else.
What to see in Assisi beyond the basilica
If you stop at San Francesco you miss half the town, and the quieter half.
The Basilica of Santa Chiara, with its facade in bands of white and pink and the huge flying buttresses holding it up, keeps the San Damiano crucifix: according to tradition it is the one before which Francis heard the voice telling him to repair the church. It is ten minutes on foot, on the other side of the centre.
In between lies Piazza del Comune, the secular heart of the town, hiding the loveliest surprise in Assisi: the temple of Minerva, a Roman temple of the first century BC whose porch and six Corinthian columns still stand perfectly. Not a reconstruction, not a ruin: those columns are the originals, and it became a church, which is exactly why it survived so well.
If you still have the energy, the Rocca Maggiore dominates the town from above and repays the climb with a view over the whole valley. And four kilometres away, in the woods of Monte Subasio, sits the Eremo delle Carceri: small, bare, and the place where you understand Francis better than in all the basilicas put together.
Practical information
The detail that surprises almost everyone: entry to the Basilica of Saint Francis is free and no booking is needed.
- Upper basilica: 8.30 - 18.45 on summer time, 8.30 - 18.00 on winter time
- Lower basilica: 6.00 - 19.00 on summer time (Wednesdays until 18.30, Saturdays until 19.30), 6.00 - 18.00 on winter time
- Tomb of Saint Francis: 6.00 - 18.30 on summer time, 6.00 - 18.00 on winter time
- Address: Piazza San Francesco 2, Assisi
- Entry: free, no booking
The hours change with summer and winter time, so there are two sets above rather than one: if you have read elsewhere that the upper basilica closes at 17.45, that is the winter timetable passed off as the year-round one. Checked in August 2026 on the friary’s website, sanfrancescoassisi.org.
The convent runs free guided visits from Monday to Saturday, usually at 10.30 and 15.30, and it is worth reserving. They are led by the friars and they are excellent: the cheapest possible way of not staring at those walls without understanding them.
Two honest warnings. First: this is a place of worship, so shoulders and knees covered, quiet, and no photography inside. Second, specific to 2026: with the eighth centenary, at weekends and around the Franciscan feast days the basilica can be genuinely packed. If you can, come on a weekday and early, when the lower church opens at six and for an hour it is almost yours.
And if you want to understand more? Entry costs nothing, but a guide changes the visit completely, above all on the Giotto cycle. You can book a guided tour of the Basilica of Saint Francis and check the available times.
Assisi as a base for Umbria
Assisi also works well as a starting point. Within half an hour’s drive lie some of the loveliest villages in the region: Bevagna, with its medieval square and workshops reviving thirteenth-century crafts, and Foligno, which has a badly underrated old town.
If you are after mountains instead, the Sibillini National Park is the other face of Umbria, and on the way you can stop at Castel Santa Maria.
Want to see everything we have written about the region? The guides are collected on the page dedicated to Umbria.
