The small church of the Annunziata, modeled after the ‘Porziuncola’ of Santa Maria degli Angeli, according to tradition, was built by Francis himself, but more plausibly, it was begun by his successors when the need to accommodate an ever-increasing number of religious made the originally ‘inherited’ spaces insufficient.
In the years immediately following the Saint’s death, Andrea Cesi, lord of the place and brother of the blessed Pietro Cesi, a follower of Francis, built a first small convent on the sides of the church with a refectory facing it. The four structures thus delimited a cloister called ‘of the blessed Pietro,’ equipped with a well-cistern.
Various expansion and reconstruction works carried out in the 15th century are attributed to the stay of Saint Bernardino of Siena at the hermitage: the construction of the convent proper, the Novitiate, the attached study rooms, and the cloister named after the saint.
Description: The following were preserved: a ‘mantellus’ that the saint supposedly wore in Cesi in 1220-21, upon returning from a mission in the Holy Land (now lost). A small ampoule of blood kept in a silver tabernacle, which a companion of Francis supposedly collected at the Hermit while treating the sacred stigmata during a stay of the Seraphic Saint between 1225 and 1226. The centuries-old forest of twisted and bent holm oaks that borders the solitary mule track leading to the sanctuary: according to tradition, the trees would have bowed as the saint passed; one plant in particular, called the ‘holy licina,’ strongly knotted and bent, would have frequently supported the saint in prayer. Relic: Fabric, Blood Place: Cave, Forest
Collection of ex-votos: No
A parchment from the Hermit, dated 1230-39, “Legenda Choralis Umbra,” attests that in the first thirty years of the 13th century, there existed here a community of Friars Minor: the documentary evidence thus confirms, if not the actual passage of Francis through Cesi, at least the very early presence of a group of Franciscans in the hermitage. The hermitage of Cesi has represented for many centuries a bastion of continuity and fidelity to the most rigorous original Franciscan message and prides itself on having hosted some of the most illustrious defenders of observance, such as the blessed Gentile da Spoleto and Paoluccio Trinci in the 14th century, Saints Bernardino of Siena and Giacomo della Marca in the 15th century. In the 16th century, it reaffirmed its vocation to the genuineness of Francis’s doctrine by offering hospitality from the beginning to the first Reformers. In the 17th and 18th centuries, numerous well-known religious chose the Hermit as a place of prayer: Antonio da Nocera, Pietro da Montefranco, Antonio da Bagnaia, the blessed Leopoldo da Gaiche, to name a few. During the events of the French suppression, before suffering the damages of such an event, the Hermitage hosted the young Francesco Possenti (future Saint Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows) who retired here to consult with his uncle Fra Fedele da Terni about his religious choice. The suppression soon involved the convent as well, which, after various unfortunate changes of ownership, fell into total abandonment until 1991, when thanks to the tenacity of a Franciscan Father Bernardino, the complex was restored and returned to being a retreat for some religious.
Tradition holds that during one of his stays at the Hermitage, Francis composed the “Exhortatio ad laudem Dei,” the first draft, in free Latin verse, of the future “Canticle of Brother Sun”; it is documented that the text of the Exhortatio at the end of the 15th century was written on a panel placed as an antependium of the altar of the chapel of Saint Francis. An almost uninterrupted oral tradition rooted in the hermitage of Cesi, as well as careful philological considerations, contribute to strengthening the attribution of this text to the Seraphic Father.
In the decades following Francis’s death, the presence of some of the most faithful companions of the Seraphic Father, such as Brother Leo and Brother Giles, is documented at the Hermitage of Cesi. The place thus became a solitary refuge for the most ardent supporters of absolute poverty, so much so that in the inquisitorial processes carried out in the years 1329-1330, in Southern Umbria, three convents are remembered: Sant’Illuminata, la Spineta, and the Hermitage of Cesi. The strong fidelity to the purity of the origins of the order cultivated in the hermitage of Cesi is also testified by another event, documented by the bull “Bonorum Operum,” issued by Clement VI on December 13, 1350, by virtue of which the ardent follower of observance Fra Gentile da Spoleto also obtained the aforementioned hermitage among the four convents in which to practice the most literal primitive spirituality. This Gentilian parenthesis lasted four years. On July 28, 1373, Pope Gregory XI, with the Bull “licterae Solemnes,” granted the movement of Fra Paoluccio Trinci 11 ‘poor and solitary’ convents, including the Hermitage of Cesi.
On May 23, 1291, Pope Nicholas IV granted an indulgence to all those who visited the small convent, defined on this occasion by the same pontiff as “Eremitae Arnulphorum.”

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