About the Sanctuary of La Foresta

Before Francis’s presence gave it wider fame, the site now known as the Sanctuary of La Foresta was a modest country church dedicated to San Fabiano, tended by a priest who supported himself with a small vineyard, an adjoining garden, a parish house, and a cottage. In the summer of 1225, at the invitation of Cardinal Ugolino — the future Pope Gregory IX — Francis travelled to Rieti to be treated by a highly regarded local eye doctor. Arriving at the city gates but wary of the public reception awaiting him, Francis chose instead to withdraw to this isolated spot, staying as the priest’s guest at San Fabiano for more than fifty days while awaiting his operation. The site is remembered above all for the “miracle of the grapes”: pilgrims flocking to see Francis during his stay ate so many of the vineyard’s grapes that the harvest that year appeared ruined, yet Francis ordered the few remaining bunches pressed anyway in a stone vat — still preserved at the site today — and the resulting yield reportedly exceeded, by more than double, the wine produced the previous year from a full and untouched harvest. At the start of the 14th century, a community of hermits (Romiti) transformed the parish house adjoining San Fabiano into a church; in 1346, these hermits, accused of heresy, were compelled to hand their complex over to the Bishop of Rieti. Followers of Angelo Clareno, known as the Clareni, took their place and remained until 1568, when their community was suppressed and absorbed into the Roman province of the Franciscan Friars. Tradition also links La Foresta, alongside its neighbouring Franciscan sites, to the composition of Francis’s celebrated Canticle of the Creatures during this same period, though modern scholarship generally attributes the poem’s actual composition to San Damiano rather than to La Foresta itself.