Walk up Via San Francesco early in the morning, before the coaches arrive and while the limestone is still cool, and you will begin to notice them. Set into the façades of the oldest houses, a metre or so above the pavement, are narrow arched openings — too tall to be windows, too high to be doors, most of them bricked up with stone that no longer quite matches the wall around it. Once you have seen one, you cannot stop seeing them. Assisi is full of them. They are called porte dei morti, doors of the dead, and they are among the most eloquent things a medieval Umbrian town can tell you about itself.
A Narrow Door and the Logic of the Medieval House
The explanation is architectural before it is superstitious. In a thirteenth-century Assisi house, the ground floor was the most valuable space in the building: it held the workshop, the shop counter, the stable, the store of oil and grain. Nothing was permitted to waste it — least of all a staircase. So the stair to the living quarters above was built tight, steep and turning, squeezed into whatever the trade downstairs could spare. It worked perfectly well for a family climbing to bed. It did not work at all for a coffin.
Hence the second door: a narrow opening cut on the first-floor landing, raised half a metre or more above the street, with a stone ledge below it wide enough to take the weight of a bier. When a death occurred in the house, the opening was unsealed and the body was carried out directly into the street, bypassing the impossible bend of the stairs entirely. Afterwards the door was locked from within and walled up again from without. The stonework you see today is the memory of that final act of masonry — a wall built not to keep something out, but to close a passage that had served its single purpose.
Around this practical arrangement, a folklore grew, as folklore does. Life and death, it was said, must never travel the same road; the living entered through one door and the dead departed through another, and the two were never to meet on the threshold. Whether the belief produced the door or the door produced the belief is the kind of question Assisi tends not to answer. What is certain is that the town preserved both, and that many of these openings survived precisely because nobody had a compelling reason to remove them. Some were later converted into shop windows. Some became the entrance to a subdivided upper apartment. A great many simply stayed shut, waiting.
Stone That Came From the Mountain Above the Town
What makes these details legible at all is the extraordinary material consistency of Assisi. From Roman antiquity onwards, the town has been built almost entirely from limestone quarried on Monte Subasio, the mountain rising directly behind it — the same rose-and-cream stone that clads the Basilica of San Francesco, the Palazzo dei Priori and the humblest house on a back lane. The result is a settlement of remarkable visual unity, one in which twenty centuries of building have all spoken the same language, and in which a repair, an infill or a bricked-up opening announces itself immediately to the trained eye.
The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were Assisi’s great building age, and their Romanesque grammar is everywhere: thick load-bearing walls, semicircular arches, façades that are imposing without ornament. Then the Gothic arrived with the Franciscan project, and the pointed arch and the ribbed vault entered the vocabulary of ordinary domestic building as well as of churches. Assisi’s builders solved the problem of a steep hillside the way every Umbrian hill town did — by vaulting. Vaults carried floors across irregular spans, buttressed one house against the next, and turned the slope of Monte Subasio into terraces of habitable stone. The barrel and cross vaults you find in the lower rooms of these houses are not decoration; they are the structural reason the town has stood for eight hundred years on a gradient.
Reading such a building is therefore a matter of reading interruptions. A change in the coursing, a patch of thin brick inside a stone arch, a lintel of a different colour, an arch whose curve continues behind a later partition: each is a decision taken by a mason at a datable moment, for a reason that can usually be reconstructed. Assisi does not hide its history under its plaster. It files it there.
What We Are Finding at Via San Francesco Assisi
This is not an abstract enthusiasm for us. Both of the historic buildings that will become Via San Francesco Assisi — The View, facing the Basilica of San Francesco, and The Convent, the fourteenth-century religious house behind it — are full of exactly these interruptions, and much of our restoration work this year has consisted of learning to read them before deciding what to do. In the lower rooms of the Convent we have uncovered vaults of dressed Subasio limestone springing from stone walls, and within them arched openings that were filled at some later date with brick of an entirely different period, plainly a secondary intervention rather than an original wall. Elsewhere a pointed window survives complete with its old timber shutters, framed by a vault that had been hidden for generations behind a false ceiling.
Our approach in every one of these cases is the same, and it is the opposite of dramatic: we leave the interruptions visible. A later infill is part of the building’s biography, and erasing it to produce a falsely uniform “medieval” surface would be a kind of lie. Lighting these rooms from the floor, as we have been doing while we survey them, makes the point better than any explanation — the raking light picks out every change of hand, every join, every place where one century met another and made a decision.
An Invitation to Look Down at the Threshold
When Via San Francesco Assisi opens in 2028, our hope is that guests will arrive already knowing how to read the town: that they will walk up from the Basilica and see not a picturesque backdrop but a document, with the doors of the dead as its footnotes. Assisi rewards that kind of attention more generously than almost any place in Italy. It is a town in which the most ordinary wall on the most ordinary lane will, if you stand in front of it long enough, tell you when it was built, when it was altered, and what happened in the house behind it.
We are documenting every one of these discoveries as the restoration proceeds. Follow the project here, and subscribe to receive each new dispatch from the two buildings — the vaults, the arches, the frescoes and the openings we have not yet opened.