St. Romuald

A young Italian nobleman who entered a monastery in horror after seeing his father kill a man in a duel. He spent the next sixty years as a hermit, founding monasteries — most famously Camaldoli in Tuscany — that combined eremitical and cenobitic life. The Camaldolese Benedictines remain to this day among the most rigorous and contemplative of Western orders.

Born around 951 into the ducal family of Ravenna, Romuald fled the violence of aristocratic life and wandered through the marshes and forests of Italy seeking ever deeper solitude. He studied under a hermit in the lagoons near Venice, reformed the monastery of Sant'Apollinare in Classe, and spent years in the Pyrenees before returning to found new communities across the Italian peninsula.

At Camaldoli, high in the Tuscan Apennines, he established a rule that wedded the solitude of the desert fathers to the stability of Benedictine monasticism — hermits living in individual cells around a central church, gathering only for the Divine Office and solemn feasts. He died in 1027, alone in his cell at Val di Castro, and his spiritual sons still keep his vision alive in hermitages scattered from Italy to Brazil.