Unstitch and Sew: The Ancient Craft Behind Our Assisi Restoration
There is a room in Building 19 that we did not know existed in this form. For centuries it wore a skin of plaster, flat and pale and unremarkable, the sort of surface you walk past without a second thought. Then, one morning this summer, the masons finished stripping it back — and the room […]
Beneath the Stones of Assisi: The Roman City Under a Franciscan Town
Stand in Piazza del Comune at eight in the morning, before the first coaches arrive, and the square feels like the calm centre of a medieval town. Six Corinthian columns rise on the north side, weathered to the colour of old ivory, holding up a pediment that has watched over this space for two thousand […]
The Doors of the Dead: Reading the Medieval Houses of Assisi
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 […]
Autumn in Assisi: A Luxury Traveller’s Guide to the Centenary Season
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, […]
Rooms Facing a Saint: The Panoramic Luxury of Assisi
There is a particular hour in Assisi, just before the evening bells, when the pink Subasio stone seems to hold the day’s last light like a cupped hand. The pilgrims have thinned. The swifts wheel over the rooftops in wide, unhurried arcs. The Umbrian plain below turns from green to gold to lavender, and the […]
The Pink Stone of Assisi: What a Medieval Wall Reveals in Restoration
There is a moment, in every restoration, when a wall stops being a surface and becomes a story. It happened to us on a bright morning inside one of our two historic buildings in Assisi, when the last of a modern plaster skin came away under the mason’s tools and revealed what had been hidden […]
The Frescoes of Assisi: How Giotto and Cimabue Gave Europe a New Way of Seeing
Step through the doors of the Upper Church of the Basilica of San Francesco and look up, and something quietly extraordinary happens. The saints on the walls are no longer flat, golden ghosts staring out of eternity. They stand in real rooms, cast shadows, turn to one another, and grieve. Eight hundred years after the […]
A Cultural Summer in Assisi: Festivals, Music and the 800th Year of Saint Francis
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, […]
The Hotel Diffuso in Assisi: Slow Luxury and the End of the Grand Hotel
Stand beneath the barrel vault on the lower floor of Building 19 and the first thing you notice is the silence. Above you, a ceiling of thin medieval bricks curves away in a single unbroken sweep — laid by hand, without steel, without cement, sometime in the fourteenth century, by masons whose names nobody wrote […]
Beneath the Plaster: The Medieval Arches We Are Bringing Back to Light in Assisi
There is a particular silence that falls on a building site the moment a hidden arch reveals itself. Last week, in one of the ground-floor rooms of our fourteenth-century convent in Assisi, a mason tapped away a panel of twentieth-century plaster and stepped back without a word. Behind it, framed in pale Subasio stone, was […]