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It was thanks to the book Francis of Assisi, by Hermann Hesse, that I discovered the pilgrimage of Saint Francis. I had never heard about the Camino de Assisi before and I didn't even know that anything like it existed in Italy. In 2021, when reading the story of the saint poetically narrated by Hermann Hesse, I learned that, in 1210, Saint Francis walked to Rome with his Franciscan brothers to ask the then Pope Innocent III for the Catholic Church to recognize his rules. The passage in the book does not describe the route they took and I immediately decided to look it up on the internet. “Aren’t there people still following the same path today?”, I reflected. What was my surprise when I found the Via di Francesco page and discovered the pilgrimage — which, in reality, does not go through exactly the same route he took at the time to go to Rome, but rather through the cities where he lived and preached.