The following is the story of an adventure I had with my brother visting the sites where Brother Son Sister Moon was filmed and re-enacting some scenes. Please check out the video, read the story, and help us solve the mystery of where the conversion (naked) scene and a couple others were actually filmed! Feel free to comment below.
Our Story
By the time I was nine, we had watched Franco Zeffirelli's Brother Sun, Sister Moon twenty-five times. Not by choice exactly. My brother Alex and I spent our evenings in the back of a vaudeville theater in Beverly, Massachusetts, while our parents—part of a group of spiritual seekers—restored the building and ran second-run films. Some were appropriate for children. Some were not. But Brother Sun, Sister Moon imprinted itself on us in a way that only childhood exposures can. The Donovan songs, the meadow scenes, the sweetly singing French mother, the young man stripping naked in the town square to reject his family fortune—all became an integral part of our childhood.
The film is the story of the life of Saint Francis, a 13th-century saint and founder of the Franciscan order. And it's a story of renewal: a young man from a rich family, returning from the crusades, seeks an authentic, free, and natural faith far from the rituals, riches, and politics of his parents' world. Having discovered the violence on which his family's fortunes are built, Francis undresses in the town square, turning both his clothing and his family name to his parents, before walking into the countryside to start a religious order.
More than fifty years after the film was made, Alex and I set out to find the scenes of this storied film. We started in Rome and then set up from the Ciampino airport in a rented Fiat with a google map of potential or purported locations that we obtained from imdb and another source, a video camera, and a comfort in looking ridiculous that only kids of the theater possess.
A Sibling Adventure
Alex and I are only one year and ten months apart, and like many kids of our generation, we more or less raised ourselves, or in our case, raised each other. We share a unique and bizarre childhood split between the theater, where we acted in the Guinness Book's longest-running stage magic show, and a bilingual French home school turned high school with 9 kids in my graduating class. When I was seventeen, and Alex was fifteen, we traveled alone through Europe (including Eastern Europe before the fall of the Iron Curtain) for weeks -- Budapest, Medjugorje, Austria, Germany, France. We'd dump coins into payphones every few days to tell our parents we were alive. Later (and perhaps unsurprisingly), we both ended up studying Comparative Religion in college. This trip was yet another sibling adventure, a combination of art, spirituality, and pure fun.
Rome
We began where Francesco ended up, in Rome. We felt almost as alien in the Vatican Museum as he did standing before the Pope Innocent III in the movie. The marble and gold, such wealth controlled entirely by men, Pope Francis, on a live stream in his last days. Greek and Roman statuary and a painting in the Raphaelle room of a cross atop a fallen statue told the story of the struggle of Christianity against "pagan" faiths and mother goddesses. Nearby, we visited the Pantheon, itself a Roman temple that became a church.
Umbria
From Rome, we drove a few hours to Marmore Falls, in Umbria, where Zeffirelli filmed Francis watching Clare treat lepers. The falls were heavy. Groups of school children hiked around and we filmed some awkward bathing and feeding scenes. My jumps and Alex's lifts were not quite as sprightly as Bernardo lifting the young boy.
Our next stop was Assisi. Oddly, none of the scenes in the movie were supposed to have been filmed there, but we thought we'd visit some actual locations. Just outside Assisi, we saw San Damiano, which was the modest church that St. Francis rebuilt, where Clare and her sisters (the Poor Clares) lived. The building was simple, old, and well-maintained. A cross like the one in the film hung inside. Just a few nuns seemed to live there still. We saw no one but a handful of other pilgrims moving quietly through the paths.
In Assisi proper, we visited the Cathedral (Frances' real family church, though not the one in the film) with its blue ceiling, and the Basilica of Saint Francis. On a whim, we stopped at Rocca Maggiore, a fortress overlooking the valley. Though this wasn't mentioned in any of our sources, it definitely had the vibe. There was almost no one there, and we filmed "flowers in the meadow", "throw it all away", the courtyard prayer scene and the "bird" scene almost without being apprehended. Later, in a furtive web search, I found that the wikipedia entry for Rocca Maggiore (but no other sources) mentions that movie scenes were shot here. We're quite certain about the courtyard scene, at a minimum.
Gubbio
We drove to Gubbio as evening fell, searching for the "conversion scene" plaza and some alleys used for rainy begging scenes and the gift of bread from Clare. It took hours to get to Gubbio -- felt like we had to drive in a big circle to enter, but the medieval city felt cozy and wise and was very likely a location for the begging scene. The Piazze di Consili, however beautiful, was definitely not in the movie. The Hotel Gattapone was straight out of the 70s with friendly Alessio at the desk. My room had two shutters that looked out over the city -- I could peek my head out just like Clare did when Francisco was getting dragged to the town square. A gorgeous breakfast in the morning. We were the only guests that night. On our way out, we stumbled upon a Roman amphitheater in the valley below, and a small museum with Iron Age tools, further proof that people had been living here for thousands of years, protected, perhaps, by mountains and the hard-to-access location.
Val d'Orcia
Next was Val d'Orcia in Tuscany, where we stopped in a field lined with Cypress trees to film meadow scenes. The earth was prickly, green, spongy and extremely high in clay. As I tried to run gracefully down a hill, like Clare coming to give her life to God, my slip-ons got sucked into the earth, and I stumbled. Alex did only marginally better as Francis, running toward me with his coat tucked over his shoulder. Our reunion, though, was close to perfect.
Nearby, at the Fortress of Montalcino, we pulled up "conversion scene" images and tried to match them to the openings and turrets of the fortress. What if they had added that lean-to or even that tower? It just didn't match. Over lunch of bean soup at a busy local restaurant, we asked our waiter if he knew the film and might have any ideas about the location. He assured us that the Fortress of Montalcino was in the film, and confided that his mother is a big fan of the movie and had named him after the Saint! We took a picture with him, and he promised to send us the name of book his mother had, in Italian, about the movie, which he did. We went back to the fortress, but still couldn't figure it out. Still, we gained a friend.
Sant'Antimo
From Montalcino, we drove to Sant'Antimo, the church where Zeffirelli filmed the family church scenes. This was definitely the place. The sound of monks singing flooded into the church. For a while, we tried to locate them and realized that the music was being piped in. We did an audio tour and then filmed briefly, though we were hampered by people around. A monastery shop had honey, bottles of oil, and monastery-branded goods. Four nuns live there now, one of whom we spotted in the monastery garden. The structure was beautiful, with both Celtic and Roman elements. Like so many important buildings, it's constructed on top of other structures. We lingered in that peaceful place, letting the music wash over us, before driving back toward Rome.
Unsolved Mysteries
- Has anyone else made a similar journey? Do you concur with our findings? Did you find anything new?
- Is there anyone who worked on or in the film who can comment?
- Where was the conversion scene actually filmed?
- Where was the field where Francesco and Claire sat in Springtime? Where was the "cloth dying" scene filmed?
- Was San Damiano in the film actually a papier-mache church, as some have indicated? It looked quite real to me? Where is it?
The Video
Clips from the Zefferelli film with our reenactments interspersed.