In the long light of an Umbrian August, Assisi seems to hold its breath. The heat softens toward evening, the pilgrims thin from the piazzas, and the pink stone of the town takes on the colour of a ripe apricot. From the walls above the Basilica of San Francesco, the whole valley opens below—olive terraces, wheat fields turned to gold, the distant haze of Perugia—and the sound that rises is not traffic but bells, and, on certain nights, the low thrum of a medieval drum. This is Assisi in its cultural season, and in 2026 that season carries a weight it has not felt in eight centuries.
The Year Assisi Has Waited Eight Hundred Years For
2026 marks the 800th anniversary of the Transitus of Saint Francis, who died on the evening of 3 October 1226 at the Porziuncola, the small chapel on the plain below the town. To mark it, the Church has proclaimed a Jubilee Year of Saint Francis, running from 10 January 2026 to 10 January 2027—a full twelve months in which Assisi becomes, more than ever, a destination of the spirit as well as the eye.
The commemorations are unusually rich. Earlier in the year, the mortal remains of Francis were placed on extended public display for the first time in living memory. The wider programme, gathered under the banner of the eighth Franciscan centenary, threads exhibitions, concerts, scholarly encounters and liturgical ceremonies across the calendar, from spring to the solemn Transitus on 3 October. For the traveller who cares about more than a photograph, it is a rare moment: a chance to witness a place living out an anniversary that belongs, in a sense, to the whole of Europe.
What makes Assisi remarkable is that none of this feels staged. The centenary is layered over a town that has kept its rhythms for centuries—and nowhere is that continuity clearer than in the events of high summer.
August: Medieval Music, Candlelight and the Crossbow
The cultural heart of the Assisi summer beats loudest in August. Early in the month, DeMusicAssisi fills the town with the sound of the Middle Ages: now in its third edition, the festival stages more than two dozen free concerts of early and medieval music in cloisters, crypts and candlelit churches, under the fitting title Gloriosus Franciscus. To hear a consort of viols in a Romanesque nave, with the summer night pressing at the doors, is to understand something about this place that no guidebook conveys.
Days later, on 11 and 12 August, the town turns to Saint Clare, the noblewoman who followed Francis and founded the Poor Clares. Her feast is among the most heartfelt in the Assisi year, drawing the community to the rose-and-white Basilica di Santa Chiara for processions and evening liturgies that have the intimacy of a family gathering rather than a spectacle.
Then, at the close of the month, comes the Palio di San Rufino, held this year from 27 to 30 August. It is one of Umbria’s great historical reenactments: a crossbow contest between the three medieval terzieri—San Francesco, San Rufino and Santa Maria—whose arbalesters aim at a target thirty-six metres distant while the whole town watches. Crossbowmen were recorded in Assisi as early as 1112, and the competition is documented from the thirteenth century. Around the contest unfolds a historical parade in period costume, the shows of the Compagnia dei Balestrieri, and a market that returns the streets, for a few days, to the Middle Ages. The winning district takes the Palio itself—a painted banner—while the finest marksman earns the coveted Silver Crossbow.
Experiencing the Season as a Traveller of Discernment
For all its riches, an Assisi summer rewards those who slow down. The town is small and steep, and its finest moments arrive off the main axis: an early breakfast on a terrace before the coaches climb the hill, a walk to the Eremo delle Carceri in the woods of Monte Subasio, a table found by instinct rather than reservation where the Umbrian kitchen—wild boar, black truffle, hand-cut strangozzi, the deep reds of Montefalco—still tastes of the land. The centenary crowds gather around the great Basilica; the pleasure lies in knowing when to step away from them.
This is precisely the spirit behind Via San Francesco Assisi, the four-star superior albergo diffuso we are creating across two historic buildings in the heart of the old town. One of them, The View, faces the Basilica of San Francesco directly, its panoramic terrace opening onto the same valley that has moved travellers for eight hundred years; the other, The Convent, is a fourteenth-century former convent whose medieval frescoes we are carefully restoring. Our conviction is that the deepest luxury Assisi can offer is not distance from the town but closeness to it—a private, unhurried vantage from which to enter its music, its feasts and its silence.
The centenary will pass, but the season will return: every August the drums will sound, the crossbows will fly, and the medieval music will drift out of the crypts into the warm dark. Assisi has always been a place that repays patience.
We are documenting every step of the restoration and every discovery along the way as we prepare to open. If you are drawn to authentic luxury, to Umbria, and to a town that has spent eight centuries perfecting the art of welcome, follow the journey of Via San Francesco Assisi and subscribe to be among the first to know when our doors open.