Tablet retreat – a Franciscan adventure

Joanna Moorhead and Peter Stanford invite Tablet readers to join them for a week of walking in the footsteps of St Francis in Assisi and La Verna to discover how the saint’s life and ideas can transform our own

What would a Tablet retreat be like? That question has been at the front of our minds over the past few weeks. We’ve been colleagues and friends for more than three decades: first at the Catholic Herald where, what seems like a lifetime ago (it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s), Peter was editor and Joanna was deputy editor. Today we both love our roles at The Tablet – Peter is a regular interviewer and Joanna is arts editor.

Over the years our families, Peter’s and Joanna’s, have enjoyed breaks at a very special villa in northern Umbria, on the border with Tuscany near Arezzo. Peter’s friend Morag Cleland runs the place: it’s a delightful farmhouse in the hills near the tiny hilltop village of Lippiano, across the valley from Monterchi, home to Piero della Francesca’s magnificent Madonna del Parto, one of the groundbreaking works of the Renaissance.

Staying at Villa Pia feels like being at a convivial house party, with terraces on which to enjoy a cup of coffee or a glass of wine and suppers of locally sourced ingredients, served (if the weather is warm enough) under the stars in the courtyard. In the summer many of the guests are families with young children, but in spring and autumn the focus is on themed weeks: and over a meal a few months ago, we got chatting about what fun it would be to take a group of Tablet readers to Villa Pia. La dolce vita meets discussion and musing on art, ecology and the meaning of life. We knew we’d love it, and we felt there had to be Tablet readers out there who would love it, too.

We turned our thoughts to a theme and we quickly realised that Villa Pia, which sits between the city of Assisi an hour to the south and the wild hilltops of La Verna an hour to the north, lent itself perfectly to a week centred on St Francis. No figure in the history of Christendom – save Jesus himself – has had such a monumental impact. We realised we could explore Francis’ life, ideas and legacy in the courtyard and round the dining table at Villa Pia, as well as have day trips to both Assisi and La Verna, the Tuscan outpost to which he retreated later in his life.

So many themes in the current-day world and Church connect to St Francis. If it was initially a surprise that the last pope took his name, it seems an obvious choice now. Francis, the saint who was charged by God to “rebuild my Church”; Francis, the eco-warrior who put care of the environment at the centre of his mission. Francis, the religious figure most depicted in art after Christ – some of the paintings he inspired would prove cornerstones of the Renaissance. Francis, who founded one of the great religious orders of the Catholic Church. Francis, whose simple entreaties (“Brother Sun, Sister Moon”) seem as much of the minute in 2025 as they did in 1224 when he penned them.

In one of our sessions Peter, who has written in his forthcoming biography of the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí on the nature of sainthood, will look not only at the canonisation of Francis – who became a saint two short years after his death – but also at wider issues around sainthood. In Assisi we will visit the tomb of the recently canonised Carlo Acutis, the London-born Italian who died in 2006 of leukaemia at the age of just 15. What is sainthood in the twenty-first century? Who are the figures the Church looks to canonise; what are the factors at play? What has sainthood meant to the story of Francis, 800 years on from his death?

Francis’ life and legacy spawned a vast quantity of art, some of the most important of it in the city where he lived: in Assisi, we will visit the Basilica of St Francis and see the Giotto frescoes depicting his life that marked a significant turning point in art history. Back at Villa Pia, Joanna will lead a session on the figure of Francis in popular culture, looking at how he has been represented by artists from Caravaggio to Stanley Spencer and Diego Rivera – and how he has been the focus of many movies, including Brother Sun, Sister Moon directed by Franco Zeffirelli, which we will watch together one evening.

Also in Assisi, we’ll be able to see the Basilica of Saint Clare. Back at Villa Pia, we’ll delve into her story – and talk not only about Clare and her relationship with Francis, but about other women in Catholic history whose stories have at times been eclipsed by those of the men they worked alongside. St Clare has long been in Francis’ shadow, though that is changing now.

Pope Francis’ defining legacy will be his championing of “integral ecology” – and Laudato si’, the title of the encyclical that lays out his belief that human life is intrinsically connected to nature, comes from the first line of St Francis’ Canticle of the Creatures. At Villa Pia our guest lecturer, Siobhan Cross, a lawyer who works on matters of climate change, will look at the role the Catholic Church might play in addressing humanity’s greatest challenge.

There are no prerequisites to joining us at Villa Pia, save a curiosity about the life and legacy of St Francis. If you’d like to explore your own creative response to the Francis story – in writing, in art, or in sketching – we will encourage you to do that. We’ll be discussing Ann Wroe’s Francis: A Life in Songs; you might like to read it before joining us, or you might want to read other books on St Francis. But if you’d rather just tip up and take it from the top, we’re absolutely fine with that as well. We are keen to explore how Francis’ life and ideas relate to how we live our own lives in the twenty-first century, and our retreat will include open forums in which we’ll share our thoughts about how we might take some of the saint’s wisdom and spirituality to heart.

We see our week at Villa Pia as an adventure, and we’d love to have Tablet readers sharing that adventure with us. We hope you will come with your own experiences and ideas. We’re looking forward to lots of conversation and to sharing ideas around the table and in the courtyard – as well as lots of time to read or swim in the pool and to walk in the Umbrian countryside, as St Francis himself once did.