Childhood: (1181-1182) he was born to Pietro Bernardone a rich cloth merchand, and Monna Pica. He has been baptized as Giovanni Bernardone after he was called Francis in honor of his commercial success. Many biographers remark about his bright clothing, rich friends, street brawls and love of pleasure. He dreamt of an adventurous life and wished to become a soldier and took part of the Collestrada’s war, but he was taken as a prisoner and went back to Assisi. Subsequently he left for Puglia in order to reach Gualtiero di Brienne taking part with him in the crusades, but during the travel he became very sick and went back to Assisi.
Conversion to a religious life: it is possible that his conversion started from his illness, after a lot of considerations he understood that the life he was living was not what he wanted. It is said that thereafter he began to avoid his former world and began to help poor people. Two meetings were really important for his conversion: in Rome: during a pilgrimage he met “Lady Poverty” and exchanged his clothes with a tattered mendicant and stood for the rest of the day among the horde of beggars and felt for the first time, what characterized all his life, the perfect gladness. After the meeting with the leprous and the miracle of the crucifix in the chapel of St. Damian, Francis decided to be a servant of Christ, in poverty and lived as a beggar wearing only a hermit dress and socks.
His work and the beginning of the Francis movement: he started the renovation of the Saint Damian’s church after he has had a mystical experience in this church, in which the Icon of Christ Crucified said to him: "go and repair my house which is falling into ruins". The walk toward the holiness of Francis was not ended, he understood that he should go and speak the words of God at this point he threw is clothes and wearing a dress in the form of a cross encircled by a "funiculum" brought God’s words among the people. Soon Saint Francis obtained a lot of followers that found an asylum in the Porziuncola. Between 1209-1210 Francis led his first followers to Rome to seek permission from Pope to found a new religious order. They were welcomed with skepticism cause of the manifold heterodox movements that the Church tried to oppose. Subsequently however, thanks that the Franciscan was very near to the Catholic orthodoxy, they got the "placet" of the Pope. Their first center was Rivotorto and then definitely Santa Maria degli Angeli, where the preaching missions started. Between 1211 and 1212, a new joy, great as it was unexpected, came to Francis, Clare, a young heiress of Assisi. The family didn’t agree her choice so she escaped to Santa Maria degli Angeli, and in the Porziuncola Francis, having cut off her hair, clothed her in the Minorite habit and thus received her to a life of poverty and penance. Chiara laid her center in Saint Damian’s church where her first sister assembled. The followers of Francis increased always more, but come out also the first problems among the friars, some that wanted to fellow rigorously the Franciscan rule and other that wanted to respect the ideals but without applying the rigid rule of poverty. After these problems in 1220 Francis came back from Palestine.
In 1221 Pope Onorio III with the "Regula non bollata" sanctioned the birth of this movement, and after with the "regula bollata" of the 1223 gave to the Order of the Friars Minor the text  of a rule that contained the principles of Francis. In the meanwhile in 1220 Francis left the management of the Order in order to devote himself more intensely to the prayer and the penitence. In 1224 near la Verna he received the stigmata. This let be stronger the comparison between the Saint and God. His Life principles have been fixed in the “Cantico delle Creature” and in his Will have been confirmed with rigor the principles of his religious life choice.
Francis died in 1226, surrounded by the Friars. The citizens of Assisi brought the body of the Saint in the Church of, where he received the first burial, after the solemn canonization by Pope Gregorio IX in July, 1228.
Clare continued in the preaching, but only in 1253 when she was dieing, she received by Innocenzo IV the approval for her own Order of the Rule conformed to the "Regula Bullata" of the Friars minor. The figure of Saint Francis is maybe one of the most fascinating of the Christian World.

Texts Kindly offered by: Editrice Minerva Assisi