children a-tiptoe to see all that is to be seen; they succeed so well
that every window gives the whole panorama set in its frame of rounded
hills, from whose summits castles and villages stand sharply out against
a sky of incomparable purity.

These simple dwellings contain no more than five or six little
rooms,[2] but the rosy hues of the stone of which they are built give
them a wonderfully cheerful air. The one in which, according to the
story, St. Francis was born has almost entirely disappeared, to make
room for a church; but the street is so modest, and all that remains of
the _palazzo dei genitori di San Francesco_ is so precisely like the
neighboring houses that the tradition must be correct. Francis entered
into glory in his lifetime; it would be surprising if a sort of worship
had not from the first been centred around the house in which he saw the
light and where he passed the first twenty-five years of his life.

He was born about 1182.[3] The biographies have preserved to us few
details about his parents.[4] His father, Pietro Bernardone, was a
wealthy cloth-merchant. We know how different was the life of the
merchants of that period from what it is to-day. A great portion of
their time was spent in extensive journeys for the purchase of goods.
Such tours were little short of expeditions. The roads being insecure, a
strong escort was needed for the journey to those famous fairs where,
for long weeks at a time, merchants from the most remote parts of Europe
were gathered together. In certain cities, Montpellier for example, the
fair was perpetual. Benjamin of Tudela shows us that city frequented by
all nations, Christian and Mohammedan. "One meets there merchants from
Africa, from Italy, Egypt, Palestine, Greece, Gaul, Spain, and England,
so that one sees men of all languages, with the Genoese and the Pisans."