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 Assisi and Santiago de Compostela, Twins at Last
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23 May 2008, Milan – Some pilgrim related news: Assisi and Santiago de Compostela have recently become twin cities. Big deal? Well, I suppose in the larger scheme of things maybe not, but if you care about the Via Francigena this could be an important step.
It will certainly raise the general awareness in Italy for pilgrimage routes and that can only be good news for the neglected Via Francigena. We’ll forget for a second that Assisi, though wonderful, has the drawback that it is not on the Via Francigena. We’ll forgive Sigeric for missing Assisi seeing how the city wasn’t exactly that close to his route and anyway San Francesco was born two centuries after the English bishop passed through Italy on his way to see the pope in Rome.
Assisi has been rather selective in choosing its twin cities and so are has only linked up with San Francisco and Bethlehem, both of which would seem to have obvious links to the city in Umbria. Those links between twin cities are not always so immediately evident and as an example I would note that my current hometown of Milan is sistered up with Manila and Melbourne (among others). Hummm, they all start with the letter “m,” but beyond that I’m not sure what they share. If I’m missing something and there is actually some link, please somebody do enlighten me.
On the other hand, there is actually a tight historic connection between Assisi and Santiago because already in 1090 (100 years before San Francesco started talking to birds and animals) Assisi built a church dedicated to Saint James (Santiago in Spanish, Giacomo in Italian) and in the 1300s there was a confraternity in the town that took care of pilgrims returning from Santiago. That tradition has lived on and today there is the very active Confraternita di San Jacopo di Compostella http://www.confraternitadisanjacopo.it/ (only in Italian).
On May 8 there was a ceremony in Assisi and the link between the two cities will be finalized on July 23 when there is another ceremony in Santiago de Compostela.
I stumbled across an interesting site – http://www.walkingwithawareness.com – which despite the hokey name is worth perusing, especially the part about their walks from Germany to Rome and from Germany to Santiago. And the great photo montage of all the different types of Via Francigena signs, I lifted that from them.
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 Anarchy on the Via Francigena |
 A Giotto fresco, a visit to Assisi is worthwhile just for these |
 Santiago has a new twin in Umbria |
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Supporting the Project: |
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In collaboration with: |
Assessorato al Turismo e alle Attività Termali della Provincia di Pavia |
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Viaggiare in Puglia |
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L'Arte di Vivere
con Lentezza |
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