Chapel of the Transit

Next to the apse of the Basilica, there is the Transit Chapel, where St. Francis welcomed sister death (October 3, 1226). Inside the Basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels, a place as humble as it is beautiful has been preserved: the cabin of the sick friars - the Transit - in which Francis passed from this world to the Father.

Being utterly sick, housed in the episcopal palace of Assisi, guarded as a public treasure, feeling near the end, and eager to conclude his experience where he had begun to live evangelically, Francis asked to be taken to his Porciuncula.

Here, stripped of the habit of sack, naked on the bare earth, dictated his spiritual testament, between the anguished cry of his children and that of Fray Jacoba, Francis, "fulfilled in him all the mysteries of Christ, he welcomed death by singing" , while a flock of larks hovered unusually around the place although the sun had already set.

The Transit (the chapel) initially was a cell of the primitive Franciscan infirmary or perhaps a piece of land in the open air before it that immediately after the death of the Saint, limited the scope, became oratorio. On the tiny altar, in an empire style reliquary, the cord that held the waist of the Poverello is preserved. On the walls, four splendid frescoes by Juan de Pietro called Spain (1520) representing the first companions of the Saint, Silvestre, Rufino, León, Maseo and Gil, and the first martyrs and saints of the Order of Minors, Berardo and colleagues. Behind the small altar, in a niche, the statue of the Saint of Andrea della Robbia, admirable work in glazed terracotta, made around 1490, which today is in the Transit Chapel, the venerable place that hosted the last beats of that heart that It did not stop until it encompassed the entire world. In this image, Francisco has the cross and the Gospel in his hands, the great loves of his whole life.

On the outer wall of the chapel that faces the little church of the Porciuncula, you can see the "Transit of St. Francis", fresco painted by D. Bruschi in 1886.

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