Can a picture connect various points of one's life?

Carol Worthington Levy  "Road to Assisi"

http://www.worthingtonfineart.com/current_work.html

     I had heard of Assisi before I took an art history course in Italian Renaissance Art from Dr. Eugenio Battisti at Penn State in 1972. The animated professor, speaking in Italian-accented British English,  prepared me well for my first trip to Europe in 1973. Previously in my education art had been for those who could actually paint, draw, or sculpt. As Dr. Battisti moved us from Cimabue and Giotto onward, I learned how to appreciate art. When I went to Rome nad Florence, I knew what to see. 

      On my third trip to Europe in 1976, I actually spent some time in Assisi. A 200 Lira miniature of St. Francis of Assisi graced my office wall at UC-Irvine when I returned to the States, which gave my then Doktorvater proof that I had become Roman Catholic.

     I had long stopped writing poetry when my good friend Carol made us a present of the above picture. Too many sermons, papers, and what-not crowded my time; anyway the Muse was not speaking to me. But something about this picture made me write poetry again. 

     What poetry does a poet actually read? I picked up some books at the recent Local authors workshop in Columbia, South Carolina, recently. One of them was Henry Sloss' The Threshold of the New, University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Sloss had been an expatriate in central Italy for over a decade, and I was intrigued by the book. 

     Maybe all of this will inspire me to write again of Umbria and Tuscany. 

     Here is what I wrote about 14 years ago inspired by the painting. My students would tell you that is ekphrasis!  

     THOUGHTS ON “A ROAD TO ASSISI”

Vineyards climb the hillsides, stretching to the sun

slender, towering trees surround the towered abbey

clear blue sky reaches to the Umbrian plain below.

There are several roads to Assisi; some quicker than others,

some easier to travel, some never taken

the way up from San Damiano is arduous

for both body and soul.

One pauses now and then up the mountain to rest

and to glimpse far off in the distance past the

vineyards and villages.

For now the city is the immediate goal

to look at the Giottos in a cool afternoon in the Duomo

but to where will one later be beckoned?

not the destination, but the journey, matters most.