Travel

Assisi from Rome or Florence: Why It's Worth the Night Halfway Between

Is Assisi worth visiting? Halfway between Rome and Florence, it works as a day trip, but it's better with a night. Trains and parking, a map of the town, the two churches of the Basilica and the vault that looks whole, Santa Chiara and the Eremo.

The Basilica di San Francesco and the long arcades of the Sacro Convento at the west end of Assisi, on the slope of Monte Subasio. Photo: Stifone, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Assisi sits halfway between Rome and Florence, a little over two hours' drive from each. You can do it in a day, but I think it's better with a night.

Is Assisi worth visiting? The short answers

Is it worth it? Yes, even if you don't come for faith. I don't come for that: many people arrive as pilgrims for Francis, I come out of curiosity, to see the architecture. In Assisi the two things are in the same place, and this guide tries to serve both.
A day or a night? A night. From Rome or Florence you can do it in a day, and if a day is all you have, that's fine: there's time for the Basilica and the old town. With the night, the next morning you can go up to the Eremo without rushing.
Train or car? Both work. The train leaves you down on the plain, at Santa Maria degli Angeli, and from there you go up by bus. The car leaves you below the walls, in one of the car parks, and from there you go up on foot or by escalator.
What to skip? If you only have the day, leave the Eremo for next time. Santa Maria degli Angeli, if you arrive by train, is on your way.

My times in Assisi

I have been to Assisi several times. The first time I was still a child, before the earthquake, and I have a lovely memory of it. Then what stayed with me were the collapses and the restoration of the church, which went on for years, and as soon as it reopened I went to see it.

The freshest memories are from December and August. In December we arrived on the 31st, Kat and I with two friends, a last-minute decision, with little money in our pockets: an ugly little flat, a bottle that had been a gift, which none of us knew and which made me fall in love with that wine, as well as with the town, and sparklers instead of fireworks, which burned my coat. In August, in 2020, I passed through on a tour of the wineries in the valley, and my own photos of the Basilica on this page are from that morning.

Why halfway

By car Assisi is about 175 kilometres from Rome and the same from Florence, a little over two hours' driving from each. That is why it works in two ways: as a day trip from either city, or as the overnight stop on a journey from Rome to Florence, or the other way round. Orvieto and Todi are on that road too, before or after.

Map of central Italy with north at the top, between the Tyrrhenian and the Adriatic. Florence is at the top left, Rome at the bottom, and Assisi in the middle to the east, next to Perugia and Foligno, with Lake Trasimeno to the west and Orvieto and Todi further south. The A1 motorway runs from Florence to Rome along the west side of Umbria; the railway lines are dashed. Scale bar of 50 kilometres. — Assisi halfway between Rome and Florence, about 175 km by road from each, with the A1 motorway and the main railway lines; Perugia, Orvieto, Todi and Foligno nearby. Map from OpenStreetMap data, © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).

Rome to Assisi by train or car

By train. From Roma Termini there are direct regional trains to Assisi station, in about two hours; others change at Foligno. Check the Trenitalia timetable before you set off.

By car. About 175 kilometres, a little over two hours. The road ends below the walls: the old town is a limited traffic zone (ZTL), with electronic gates, and the hours are set by the Comune. If you are staying inside the walls, ask your hotel how to get in by car. Otherwise leave it in one of the car parks listed below.

Florence to Assisi by train or car

By train. From Firenze Santa Maria Novella it takes about two and a half hours. The sources don't agree on direct trains: some list a few, others say you always have to change, at Terontola or Foligno. Check the Trenitalia timetable for the day you travel.

By car. From Florence too it is about 175 kilometres, a little over two hours, and the same rules apply for the ZTL and the car parks.

From Assisi station to the town

Assisi station is not in Assisi. It is down on the plain, at Santa Maria degli Angeli, four or five kilometres from the old town, which sits on the side of the mountain. It's too far to walk, uphill, with luggage. Line C of Busitalia stops in front of the station and goes up towards the Basilica and the old town: the timetable is on the Busitalia website.

The great dome you see down on the plain as you leave the station is Santa Maria degli Angeli. More on it below.

A hill town of pale stone spread along a green mountainside, with a large church and a long arcaded convent at its left end and a small castle on the ridge above, seen across fields and olive trees with power lines in the foreground. — Assisi from the plain: the Basilica and the convent at the left end, the town stretched along the side of the mountain, the Rocca Maggiore on the hill above. Photo: Gunnar Bach Pedersen, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Parking in Assisi

The four main car parks, all paid, are around the walls and are run by Saba. Giovanni Paolo II is the closest to the Basilica. Mojano has escalators that take you up towards the centre. Matteotti is at the top, near the Duomo and the Rocca; Porta Nuova is at the other end of town, near Santa Chiara. Prices are on the Saba website. Which one suits you depends on your route; see below.

The order of the visit

Assisi is a town on a slope, along the side of Monte Subasio. The Basilica is at the bottom, at one end; Santa Chiara at the other; the Piazza del Comune in between; the Duomo and the Rocca at the top. You can do it in two ways.

From the bottom. Leave the car at Giovanni Paolo II, or get off the bus at the Basilica, and start with Francis. Then walk up Via San Francesco to the Piazza del Comune, and from there to the Duomo, the Rocca and Santa Chiara. It is uphill all the way.

From the top. Leave the car at Matteotti, start with the Rocca and the Duomo, walk down to the Piazza del Comune and then to the Basilica, which becomes your last stop. Santa Chiara is a little off this line, towards Porta Nuova: go there before you walk down. You only climb once, at the end, to get back to the car.

If you have the night, do the upper town on the first day and the Basilica the next morning, when it opens. In winter the Rocca closes in the afternoon: check the hours before you climb up.

A panoramic view from a hillside of a long town of stone houses on a slope, with a castle with a tall keep on a hill to the right and a church with a bell tower at the far end, above a wide green plain. — The whole town from Monte Subasio: the Rocca Maggiore on its hill to the right, the houses running down the slope to the Basilica at the far end, and the plain beyond. Photo: Gunnar Bach Pedersen, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A paved descent in bands of pale and pink stone turning towards a long square closed by an arched portico, with a small stone building in the middle of the descent and the plain and blue hills on the horizon. — Down to the Basilica from the town: at the bottom, the lower square with its portico, and beyond the portico the valley.

A map of Assisi

The map puts the town on a single page. Off the map to the west, down on the plain, are the station and Santa Maria degli Angeli; on it, the road up and the four car parks around the walls; at the top, the line that runs from the Basilica to Santa Chiara by way of the Piazza del Comune, with the Duomo and the Rocca above. Both routes, from the bottom and from the top, can be followed on it.

Map of Assisi with north at the top. The walled town runs from the Basilica di San Francesco at the west end to Porta Cappuccini at the east, with Via San Francesco climbing to the Piazza del Comune and the Temple of Minerva in the middle, San Rufino to the east, Santa Chiara below it and the Rocca Maggiore on the hill above. Car parks are marked at Giovanni Paolo II, Mojano with its escalators, Matteotti and Porta Nuova; arrows point west to the station and Santa Maria degli Angeli, and east along path 350 to the Eremo delle Carceri. Scale bar of 200 metres. — Assisi on the side of Monte Subasio: the Basilica di San Francesco at one end, Santa Chiara at the other, the Piazza del Comune in between, San Rufino and the Rocca Maggiore above, and the four car parks around the walls. The station and Santa Maria degli Angeli are down on the plain, off the map. Map from OpenStreetMap data, © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).

The Basilica of San Francesco: the two churches and the tomb

You go in from below, from the lower square. The Basilica is two churches, one on top of the other. The lower one was begun in July 1228, the day after Francis was made a saint, and was ready in 1230, when his body was brought there. The Basilica was consecrated in 1253. According to tradition, the hill it stands on was the one where executions were carried out.

The lower church is low and dark, and there is hardly a wall without painting. Cimabue, Giotto and his workshop, Pietro Lorenzetti and Simone Martini all worked here. The first chapel on the left is Simone Martini's, with the stories of Saint Martin, painted in the second decade of the fourteenth century: if you have time for one thing only, that's it. From the nave you go down to the crypt, to Francis's tomb. The body had been hidden under the altar to protect it from relic thieves, and for centuries no one knew any longer where it was: it was found only in 1818, after almost two months of digging.

Then you go up to the upper church, tall and full of light. Along the nave, in the lower band, run the twenty-eight scenes of the life of Francis. Vasari attributed them to Giotto, and historians are still arguing about it: some say Giotto, some say other painters working on the same site. Look at them one after another, and make up your own mind.

On 26 September 1997 the earthquake brought down two parts of the vault of the upper church and killed four people, who had gone in to check the damage from the tremor of the night before. The church reopened two years later, but the work on the frescoes went on until 2006: more than three hundred thousand fragments of painting were gathered from the rubble, catalogued and put back together. Another part of the work you can't see: inside the structure there are anti-seismic devices, put there so that the damage won't happen again. Where to look for the rest is just below.

The practical things, as of October 2026. Entry is free for individual visitors; groups book. From April to October the lower church is open from 6am to 7pm and the upper church from 8.30am to 6.45pm; from November to March the lower church closes at 6.30pm and the upper at 6pm. On Wednesdays the lower church closes an hour earlier. The tomb is open from 6am to 6.15pm. Shoulders and knees must be covered. Photography is not allowed, at least in the lower church and the crypt.

A large church of pale stone with a square bell tower on the left, the carved doorway of the lower church in the middle, and on the right a gabled front with a rose window reached by a long diagonal flight of steps, between arcades, under a deep blue sky. — From the lower square: on the left the bell tower, in the middle the doorway of the lower church, on the right the stairs up to the upper one.

The gabled front of a white stone church, with a large rose window in the middle and a two-arched Gothic doorway, beside a bell tower, beyond a green lawn. — The upper church, from the upper square: a plain front, with the rose window and the double doorway.

One step to the side: the vault that looks whole

In the upper church it comes naturally to look at eye level, along the stories of Francis. Take one step to the side and look up. Above you, in 1997, the ceiling came down in two places, and if you don't know it you won't notice.

The first is at the entrance. Go in, take a few steps along the nave and turn back towards the door. The first bay has four vault segments with the four Doctors of the Church: Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory and Jerome. Saint Jerome's, attributed to the young Giotto, had shattered into about fifty thousand pieces, and went back up in 2002, after the saints on the arch above the door. The second place is over the high altar: the segment with Saint Matthew painted by Cimabue and the one next to it, with the starry sky, back in place in 2006.

They don't look broken because the restorers wanted it that way. The missing parts were not marked with hatching, which nobody could make out from twenty-two metres below. In the Saint Matthew they were filled with a neutral colour, matched to the original, so that from the ground the painting reads as a whole. About two thirds of the Saint Jerome came back. Of the Saint Matthew, a quarter or a little less, and the rest is plaster and colour: Giuseppe Basile, who led the restoration of the paintings, said that saint should be considered lost. Now that you know, look at the two segments again, and compare them with the others.

Longitudinal section diagram of a church on two levels: above, a tall nave of four bays with ribbed pointed vaults, clustered piers, tall slim two-light windows flanked by empty picture frames, and a band of empty frames under a walkway, a crossing with a large rose window and an apse with the choir at the left end, timber roof trusses above; below, a lower church whose low pointed vaults are cut through in section, solid above, with side chapels seen beyond; beneath the left end, a crypt with a tomb. Two vault zones are hatched in red, over the entrance at the right and over the crossing at the left, and a red dot in the nave marks where to stand, with dotted lines of sight to both. Scale bar of 10 metres. — The Basilica in section, with the lower church under the upper one and the crypt with Francis's tomb beneath. In red, the two places where the vault fell in 1997: the first bay, over the entrance, and the crossing, over the high altar. Diagram after the longitudinal section in Jules Gailhabaud's Monuments anciens et modernes and the 1835 Descrizione of the Basilica; the fresco fields are left empty. Drawing: The Slow Architect, 2026.

Above the Basilica: the Temple of Minerva, the Duomo and the Rocca

From Via San Francesco you climb to the Piazza del Comune. On its long side stands the Temple of Minerva: six Corinthian columns from the first century BC, their bases set on the steps of the stairway because there wasn't enough room. Since 1539 the inside has been a church. Goethe arrived on 26 October 1786 and wrote that it was the first complete ancient monument he had seen. If you've come for the architecture, stop here: a Roman temple with its front still whole, inside a medieval square.

Higher up is San Rufino, the Duomo. The front is Romanesque, with three carved doorways and three rose windows, and inside is the font where, according to tradition, Francis and Clare were baptised. Higher still, above everything, is the Rocca Maggiore, rebuilt after 1174 and again in the fourteenth century: from the top you can see the valley. The Rocca's hours change with the seasons and with exhibitions: ask at the tourist office in the Piazza del Comune.

Be warned, though: Assisi is a very touristy town. The centre is full of shops: some sell things that are frankly ugly, souvenir stuff, a few sell nicer things. If you're looking for the saint and his teaching, you'll have to make an effort to find them. I did come away with a sense of commercialisation.

The front of a Roman temple at dusk, with six fluted Corinthian columns standing on high bases set into a stone stairway and a pediment above, its porch lit warm orange, with two passers-by seen from behind in the square. — The Temple of Minerva in the Piazza del Comune: six Corinthian columns of the first century BC, with their bases set on the steps, and a church inside since 1539. Photo: Berthold Werner, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A stone castle with a tall keep and a long curtain wall running down a steep grassy ridge, with wooded hills and distant blue mountains behind it. — The Rocca Maggiore from the north. Photo: Laura Falcinelli, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Basilica of Santa Chiara

At the other end of town, towards Porta Nuova, is Santa Chiara. It was built between 1257 and 1265, in bands of white and pink stone from Monte Subasio, and the three great arches that prop it up along its side were added in the fourteenth century. Inside, in the chapel of San Giorgio, is the crucifix of San Damiano, the one that, according to tradition, spoke to Francis. From the square in front of the church you can see the valley.

The gabled front of a church striped in white and pale pink stone, with a large rose window, a round window above it and a central doorway, a wide stone arch springing from its left side, trees on the right and blurred figures in the square in front. — Santa Chiara, in bands of white and pink stone from Monte Subasio, with one of the great flying buttresses on its left side. Photo: Berthold Werner, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; people blurred by The Slow Architect.

If you have the next morning: the Eremo delle Carceri and Santa Maria degli Angeli

The Eremo delle Carceri. It is in the woods of Monte Subasio, about four kilometres from the town and at around 800 metres above sea level: it is where Francis withdrew to pray. From Porta Cappuccini you can walk there on path 350, three and a half kilometres uphill; you can also get there by car or taxi. Entry is free.

Santa Maria degli Angeli. It is the dome down on the plain, near the station. It is a huge basilica, built between 1569 and 1679 to a design by Galeazzo Alessi, around a tiny chapel, the Porziuncola, the first home of Francis's friars. Inside is also the Cappella del Transito, where Francis died in 1226. A church inside a church: if you're leaving by train, stop.

A large church of pale brick and stone with a tall ribbed grey dome and lantern, a square bell tower with an arched belfry and a small gilded statue on the roofline at the left, seen across a vineyard and a lawn, with tall cypresses on the left, under a deep blue sky. — Santa Maria degli Angeli from the side: the great dome, with the Porziuncola directly beneath it, and the bell tower. Photo: Andreas Manessinger, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

When to go

The day to avoid is 4 October, the feast of Francis: since 2026 it has been a national holiday again, for the first time since 1977, and in 2027 it falls on a Monday, so the weekend before it becomes a long one.

Sleeping, and drinking

Stay inside the walls: the night is the reason it's worth stopping. That time, on a budget, we had an ugly little flat.

For wine, look towards Montefalco and Bevagna, where I did that August tour: wine matters enormously there, and there are a great many wineries.

How to visit

Assisi, from Rome or Florence, with a night halfway

From Rome

About 2 hours, by train or car

From Florence

2 to 2½ hours, by train or car

Time needed

A day, better with a night

Day to avoid

4 October, the feast of Francis

Getting there

By train from Rome. From Termini, about two hours to Assisi station, on a direct regional train or changing at Foligno.

By train from Florence. From Santa Maria Novella, about two and a half hours, changing at Terontola or Foligno; check for direct trains on the day you travel. Timetables are on Trenitalia.

From the station to the town. The station is down on the plain, at Santa Maria degli Angeli, four or five kilometres away. Take Busitalia line C, which stops in front of the station and goes up towards the Basilica and the old town.

By car. About 175 km from Rome and the same from Florence, a little over two hours. The old town is a limited traffic zone with electronic gates: leave the car in one of the four car parks below the walls, all paid and run by Saba. Giovanni Paolo II is the closest to the Basilica; Mojano has escalators up towards the centre; Matteotti is at the top, near the Duomo and the Rocca; Porta Nuova is at the other end of town, near Santa Chiara.

From the top, in this order

The Rocca Maggiore. Leave the car at Matteotti and climb first. From the top you can see the valley.
San Rufino, the Duomo. The Romanesque front with three rose windows, and the font where, according to tradition, Francis and Clare were baptised.
Santa Chiara. A little off the line, towards Porta Nuova: go before you walk down.
Piazza del Comune and the Temple of Minerva. Six Corinthian columns from the first century BC, with their bases set on the steps.
The Basilica di San Francesco, last. Down Via San Francesco: the lower church, the tomb, then the upper church. Turn back towards the door and look up.

Hours

The Basilica is free for individual visitors; groups book. From April to October the lower church is open from 6am to 7pm and the upper church from 8.30am to 6.45pm; from November to March the lower church closes at 6.30pm and the upper at 6pm. On Wednesdays the lower church closes an hour earlier. The tomb is open from 6am to 6.15pm. Shoulders and knees must be covered. Check the Basilica's website before you go. The Rocca Maggiore's hours change with the seasons and with exhibitions: ask at the tourist office in Piazza del Comune. The Eremo delle Carceri is free, on foot from Porta Cappuccini along path 350.

Combine it with

The next morning, the Eremo delle Carceri in the woods of Monte Subasio, or Santa Maria degli Angeli down by the station, with the Porziuncola under its dome. On the road between Rome and Florence: Orvieto and Todi. Perugia is half an hour away by train; Montefalco and Bevagna, for the wine, a short drive down the valley.

Last checked: October 2026. All the day trips from Rome, with the map and the times by train and car, are on one page. Hours change: always check the official sites before you travel.