From the Rocca Maggiore the basilica of San Francesco looks small, far down in the town. It is a detail that explains Assisi better than many books: the fortress stands high because it was the emperor's fist on the city, and here, according to the sources, Frederick II of Swabia spent his infancy, carried up as a child onto Mount Subasio. In 1198 the people of Assisi rebelled, drove out the imperial legate along with the child and smashed the fortress with picks. That year a sixteen-year-old boy of the town, the son of a cloth merchant, was still called Francesco di Pietro di Bernardone.
What to see
The fortress you visit today is not the one of 1173, the first on record: it is the rebuilding ordered in 1356 by cardinal Egidio Albornoz, sent from Avignon to put the strongholds of the Papal State back in order. The walls of pink Subasio stone form a trapezium with a tower at each corner, and at the centre rises the keep, commanding the whole Tescio valley on one side and the Umbrian plain on the other, as far as Perugia.
The finest part is the corridor leading to the polygonal tower on the north-west, built in the fifteenth century by the mercenary captain Jacopo Piccinino: a long, narrow covered passage, with arrow slits at regular intervals and the light coming in as blades. You walk bent over, in the dark, and come out at the top of the tower with the plain in front of you. Outside, the walls run down along the ridge and hook onto the Rocca Minore at the other end of the town: the whole defensive system in one glance.
Visiting
You climb from the centre in a good quarter of an hour of steep going, by via di Porta Perlici or the lanes above the cathedral of San Rufino; the ticket belongs to the civic museum circuit, hours are seasonal and shorter in winter. An hour. Closed shoes: the walkways are uneven and the corridor is low. In bad weather some towers stay shut.
Our editors' tip
Do the tower corridor, even if it looks awkward, and do it without switching on your phone: the arrow slits give enough light to see where to put your feet, and it is the only way to understand what being inside a fortress was like. Then, from the top of the keep, look for the roof of the basilica down to the left. Eight hundred years ago, from these same battlements, they kept watch on the heads of the people who would go on to make Assisi famous.