Seventeen years, an oral approval, a lost first text and two versions of the rule: how a fraternity of penitents in Assisi became the Franciscan order.
A season that moves through Italy for two months: from the first alpine larches above Cogne to the last Japanese maples on the pre-alpine lakes, where to find fall foliage and why it never arrives everywhere at once.
White truffle weekends in Alba, new oil in the mills of Umbria and Puglia and the first Christmas markets in Trento and Bolzano: what Italy in November actually looks like.
This is the early life of Francis of Assisi, in the two decades before he founded a religious order. The son of a wealthy Assisi cloth merchant became a soldier, a prisoner of war in Perugia, and finally, in a public square, the man who returned to his father every coin and garment he owned.
Foliage on the Triangolo Lariano, villas down to their last weeks and lake traffic thinning toward the off season, from late September through the first weeks of November.
An eighteenth century Habsburg summer retreat that later hosted a Napoleonic viceroy and Savoy kings, watching in silence over the finish line each September.
Truffle season in Piedmont, the last warm swims in Sicily and the 800th anniversary of Francis of Assisi: what October actually looks like across the country.
Summer lets go without any hurry, the grape harvest quietly gets underway, and the crowds that filled every piazza in July finally thin: a region by region look at Italy's most generous shoulder season.
