Assisi and Umbria in October: St Francis's 800th anniversary, Italy's first new national holiday in fifty years, and the olive harvest after the pilgrims leave

On the evening of 3 October 1226, a blind, exhausted man of 44 asked to be laid naked on the bare earth outside a tiny chapel in the plain below Assisi, and died there singing. The chapel, the Porziuncola, now stands inside a basilica built around it; the town on the hill above became Italy’s great pilgrimage town after Rome. Eight hundred years later, to the day, the country is doing something it has not done since 1977: making 4 October, the feast of St Francis, a national holiday again. Schools and offices close. Assisi expects the busiest weekend in its modern history. And then, the following Saturday, the olive mills of Umbria open their doors and the region gets on with its other October business.

That is the shape of this piece: the anniversary weekend for those who want to be there, and the three weeks after it for those who would rather have Assisi to themselves. Via Peregrina’s guide to Assisi in 2026 covers the whole Jubilee Year of St Francis, which runs to 10 January 2027; The Conversation’s historian’s essay is the best short account of who the merchant’s son from this town actually was. Pope Leo XIV was here in August and October is spoken of as a return; nothing was confirmed at the time of writing, and Assisi will be full regardless.

Two churches, one on top of the other

The Basilica of San Francesco is two buildings stacked. You enter the Lower Church first — dark, low, Romanesque, painted by Simone Martini, Pietro Lorenzetti and Cimabue — and descend from it to the crypt where Francis’s stone coffin sits behind a grille, the reason all of this exists. Then you climb to the Upper Church, Gothic and full of light, whose nave carries the 28 scenes of the Life of St Francis attributed to Giotto and his workshop: the saint giving his cloak to a poor knight, preaching to the birds, receiving the stigmata at La Verna, dying at the Porziuncola. Painted around 1290, they are the moment Italian art stopped being Byzantine and started looking at people. The basilica’s official site has the hours — the Lower Church and tomb from six in the morning to six at night, the Upper from half past eight, both free, no reservation, no photographs — and Savoring Italy’s 2026 Assisi guide fills in the rest of the town: Santa Chiara with its pink-and-white striped flank, the Rocca Maggiore above, San Damiano below where Clare lived, and where to leave the car.

Go early or late. The crypt at six in the morning, with a few friars and no tour groups, is a different building from the crypt at noon. And walk out of it. The path to the Eremo delle Carceri leaves from Porta Cappuccini and climbs for about an hour through holm-oak woods to the hermitage on Monte Subasio where Francis and his first companions slept in caves; it is the quietest place in the whole anniversary year, and the reason he chose it is obvious when you get there.

The weekend itself, and the week after

If you want the 3rd and 4th, be clear about what they are. The Transitus — the evening liturgy marking the moment of his death — is held on the 3rd at the basilica and at the Porziuncola in Santa Maria degli Angeli, the town in the plain; the 4th is the solemn feast with national and regional dignitaries, concerts and events strung between the two. It will be moving and it will be dense; hotels in Assisi itself are largely gone for that weekend, and the sensible base is one of the towns ten to twenty minutes away, covered below.

If you would rather not, come the week after. The pilgrims thin out fast, the weather in mid-October is typically 18–20°C and clear, the vines are being picked and the olives are about to be. Go Ask A Local’s week in Umbria — three nights in Perugia, three in Spoleto, one in Orvieto, with Assisi, Spello, Bevagna and Montefalco as days out — is the best structure for that trip; The Geographical Cure’s version is written by an art historian and is stronger on what to look at once you are inside the churches. Both agree you need a car.

Sagrantino first, then the oil

Umbria’s harvest runs in two acts. In Montefalco, twenty minutes south of Assisi, Sagrantino — a native grape with more tannin than almost anything else in Italy, traditionally made sweet for the church and only turned dry in the 1970s — is still being picked in the first half of October. Wine Travel Guides’ Montefalco primer explains the grape and the estates that receive visitors; two are worth booking ahead. Antonelli San Marco runs a guided vertical of four Sagrantino vintages with a cellar tour and bruschette — €80 a head for four or more, €100 for two — which is the fastest way to understand how the wine changes over fifteen years. Arnaldo Caprai, the estate that rescued the grape from near-extinction, does “Sagrantino Lovers” tastings from about €40 with the vineyards falling away towards the town.

Then the second act. From Saturday 17 October to 15 November the region runs Frantoi Aperti — open olive mills — across five weekends: working frantoi you can walk into while the presses run, new oil poured green and peppery onto bread, village walks through the groves, a trail run on the 18th. Adagio Umbro’s English explainer lays out which villages host which weekend. The oil around Spello, Trevi and the slopes below Assisi is made largely from Moraiolo olives and is deliberately aggressive — grassy, artichoke-bitter, a burn at the back of the throat that Tuscans consider bad manners and Umbrians consider the point.

Truffles are the third thing on every October menu, and Umbria Tours’ seasonal food guide is honest about the calendar: autumn brings the white and the black uncinato, while the prized black of Norcia peaks from December. For the hunt itself, Epicureo’s account of a dawn in the Valnerina — a trifolau, a dog, a farmhouse lunch within the hour — tells you exactly what you are buying.

Spello, Bevagna and the road over Subasio

Spello is ten minutes from Assisi and a fraction of the size: a Roman town folded into a hill, its lanes planted with geraniums by people who compete about it. In Santa Maria Maggiore, Pinturicchio’s Baglioni Chapel of 1500 — an Annunciation with the painter’s own self-portrait hanging on the wall behind the angel — costs €3 and is empty most afternoons; The Geographical Cure’s day in Spello covers it and the walk out through the upper gate into the olive groves. Bevagna, in the plain, has a restaurant in the ambulatory of a Roman theatre and a piazza that has not changed since the thirteenth century. And for the ambitious, the Trail of Mortai walks from Assisi to Spello over the top of Monte Subasio by way of the hermitage — 17 kilometres, most of a day, part of the Via di Francesco pilgrim route — arriving in Spello at the hour the light hits the stone.

Assisi itself, or Spello ten minutes away

For the anniversary weekend, sleeping inside the walls is a matter of luck and money. The one to try is NUN Assisi Relais & Spa Museum: eighteen suites in the monastery of Santa Caterina, founded 1275, each a former cell, with a spa built among the first-century Roman remains found under the cloister — Tablet’s review is fair about what the money buys. Every other week of October, sleep in Spello. Palazzo Bocci is an eighteenth-century palazzo in the centre with frescoed ceilings and a garden terrace, and from its door Assisi is a ten-minute drive, Montefalco twenty, and the olive groves a walk uphill. Eat back in Assisi at Osteria Piazzetta dell’Erba, a few steps off Piazza del Comune, which cooks Umbrian ingredients with more imagination than the pilgrim menus around it.

Two films before you go — Rick Steves’ full episode on Francis’s town, and a recent afternoon that pairs Assisi’s lanes with a Sagrantino tasting down the road:

25:01

25:53

Getting there is easy: trains from Rome Fiumicino reach Assisi station in about two hours fifty via Termini, sixteen a day, and Umbria Airlink connects Perugia’s small “San Francesco d’Assisi” airport to Assisi station in twenty minutes, timed to the flights. Twenty-six days until the Transitus, six weeks until the first new oil hits the bread. The basilica hours, the hermitage path, the Sagrantino tastings, the Frantoi Aperti weekends and the Spello palazzo are all gathered in our Assisi and Umbria collection — save it, decide which October you want, and leave with a litre of oil that bites.

This guide was curated using Epic Itineraries — save links from anywhere on the web, organise them into collections, and turn research into itineraries.