“Assisi – best spiritual vibrations anywhere I’ve been, along with India,” enthused the mustached British man next to me on the bus to Florence. Pleased to find a fellow anglophone, he chatted away happily, telling me how he’d retired, sold his house in London and moved to Assisi. He hadn’t yet learned Italian but could manage enough Sanskrit to read the Upanishads.

A spiritual dilettante. Wonderful. It was 7:30 a.m., I’d missed coffee, breakfast and a train, and my feet, after walking for eight days and 115 miles to commemorate the 800th anniversary of the death of St. Francis, hurt. Yet when my companion gave his verdict on how Francis had transformed his world, my cranky heart warmed to him. “I think when people met Francis, they looked at him and they thought, whatever he’s got, I want it. Just tell me what I have to do.”

St. Francis was the greatest religious genius Europe has ever produced, according to Kenneth Clark. But not everyone gets him. “He’s not my favorite saint,” a woman in Valfabbrica told me, handing me the keys to my lodgings. “I think he was trying to avoid responsibility.”

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Our walk to Assisi began in the remote vastness of La Verna in Tuscany. When it comes to the life of St. Francis, La Verna is perhaps the hardest place to start. We can picture Francis singing to the sun and preaching to the........

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