By the middle of September, the light over Assisi changes. The white flare of August softens into something lower and warmer, and the limestone of Monte Subasio — the same stone that built the town — turns the colour of pale honey in the late afternoon. The tour coaches thin out. The Piazza del Comune, with the Torre del Popolo standing over it like a sentinel, belongs again to people who live here and to the small number of travellers who understood that autumn is Assisi’s finest hour. In 2026, that autumn carries a weight no other year can match: eight hundred years have passed since Francis died at the Porziuncola on the evening of 3 October 1226, and the town he never left is spending the season saying so.
September: The Cloisters Open, and So Does the Conversation
The first great appointment of the season is Il Cortile di Francesco, now in its twelfth edition and held this year across two long weekends — 10 to 13 and 17 to 20 September. Promoted by the friars of the Sacro Convento, it is not a religious festival in the conventional sense. It is a public conversation, staged in the cloisters and gardens beside the Basilica, in which theologians sit alongside scientists, novelists, economists and journalists. The 2026 theme, Una bella notizia — “good news” — turns on the value of life itself, an appropriate question for the year of the centenary.
The programme rewards a traveller who plans. On the evening of 10 September, the Chiostro dei Morti hosts a screening of Frate Sole, the 1918 silent film on the life of Francis, accompanied live at the piano by Mario Mariani — the kind of event that would sell out a concert hall in Milan and here is watched under the open sky, in a courtyard six centuries older than the film. From 18 to 20 September the Lower Square of San Francesco is given over to the infioratori of Spello, who spend three days assembling a carpet of flower petals dedicated to the saint; it is unveiled at midday on Sunday the 20th and gone within hours. The festival closes that same evening with Sia Laudato San Francesco, an evening of popular devotion and liturgical music beneath the Basilica.
Two other September dates deserve a place in the diary. Birba chi legge, the festival of storytelling for children and young readers, runs from 17 to 20 September with itinerant readings through the historic centre. And on 24 and 25 September, Assisi hosts the World Tourism Event, the international salon dedicated to UNESCO World Heritage sites — free to enter, unexpectedly good, and a reminder that this town of some 28,000 people is one of the few places on earth where an entire historic centre carries World Heritage status.
October: The Transitus, and a Jubilee That Only Comes Once
On the evening of 3 October, Franciscan churches across the world observe the Transitus — the vigil marking Francis’s passage from death into eternal life. In Assisi it is observed where it happened, at the Porziuncola, the tiny chapel Francis rebuilt with his own hands and which now stands, improbably and rather movingly, inside the vast Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli on the plain below the town. In an ordinary year the Transitus draws pilgrims. In 2026, the eight hundredth, it is the pivot of a Jubilee Year of Saint Francis proclaimed by Pope Leo XIV, running from 10 January 2026 to 10 January 2027 under the motto Saint Francis Lives.
That Jubilee has already produced one genuinely historic moment: between 22 February and 22 March this year, the saint’s mortal remains were brought up from the crypt and displayed at the foot of the papal altar in the Lower Church for a full month — the first extended public display in the modern era. Travellers who missed it should not assume the year is spent. The autumn calendar around 4 October, Francis’s feast day and Italy’s national day of the patron saint, is the densest of the entire centenary, and the town is preparing accordingly.
A practical word: accommodation in the historic centre for the first week of October is, in a normal year, difficult. In this one it is a matter of booking many months ahead, and of knowing which side of the town you want to wake up on.
Late Autumn: The Olive Harvest, and Umbria at Its Most Generous
Then the crowds go, and what remains is our favourite Assisi of all. From 17 October to 15 November, Frantoi Aperti — now in its twenty-ninth edition — opens the working olive mills of Umbria across five consecutive weekends. This is not a food fair. It is the region’s actual harvest, and visitors are invited into it: into the mills while the presses are running, along the olive roads between fortified villages, to tables where new oil, still green and peppery enough to catch the back of the throat, is poured over bread that was baked without salt precisely so it would not compete.
The 2026 edition has been woven deliberately into the centenary, with EVO&Art itineraries linking the sub-zones of the Umbria PDO to Franciscan sites, art, and the biodiversity of the olive landscape. The hillside beneath Assisi — a belt of silver-grey groves that the region has protected as a landscape in its own right — is where much of this happens, within walking distance of the town walls.
Where the Season Meets Our Project
Everything described above happens within a few hundred metres of two buildings we are currently restoring on Via San Francesco, the street that runs from the Piazza del Comune down to the Basilica — the route that every pilgrim, every visitor and every procession has taken for eight centuries. Building 48, “The View”, faces the Basilica directly; from its panoramic terrace the flower carpet in the Lower Square and the evening processions of early October are not something you go out to find, but something that unfolds in front of you. Building 19, “The Convent”, a fourteenth-century religious house whose medieval frescoes are re-emerging from beneath later plaster as our restorers work, sits a short walk up the same street.
Our four-star superior hotel diffuso will open in 2028 — too late for this centenary, and we are the first to say so. But the calendar we have just described is precisely the argument for the way we are building it. A season like this one is not experienced from a coach at eleven in the morning. It is experienced by staying inside the walls, walking out after dinner when the Basilica is floodlit and the street is empty, and being close enough to the Porziuncola, the cloisters and the olive groves that none of it requires logistics. That is what a hotel diffuso in Assisi is for: not a compound with a view of the town, but rooms within the town itself.
Follow the Restoration
We are documenting this project week by week — the discoveries behind the plaster, the craftsmen, the arguments about a single window, and the Assisi that surrounds it all. If you are planning a journey to Umbria this autumn, or simply want to watch two historic buildings come back to life, follow the journal and subscribe for updates. We will be here long before 2028, and we would like you to arrive already knowing the street.