rnment,
which has let out their hospice for an hotel. About an hour above the
monastery, among the pine trees, is the Sacro Eremo, the Holy Hermitage,
where in some twenty separate cells the Hermits of Camaldoli live; for,
as their arms go to show, the Order is divided into two parts,
consisting of monks who live in community, and hermits who live alone.

S. Romuald, the founder of the Order, of the family of the Dukes of
Ravenna called Honesti, was born in that city in 956. He seems to have
grown up amid a certain splendour, and to have been caught by it, but by
a love of nature no less; so that often when he was hunting, and found a
beautiful or lonely place in the woods away from his companions, he
would almost cry out, "How happy were the old hermits, who lived always
in such places!" The romance of just that: it seems to have struck him
from the first. Not long after, when he was but twenty years old, his
father, deciding a dispute with a relation by fighting, fell, and
Romuald, who had been compelled to witness this dreadful scene, was so
overwhelmed by the result that he retired for a time to the Benedictine
Monastery at Classis, not far from Ravenna. After some difficulties had
been disposed of, for he was his father's heir, he spent seven years in
that monastery; but his sincerity does not appear to have pleased
certain of the fathers, so that we find him at last obliged to retire to
Venice, where, in fulfilment of his earliest wishes, he placed himself
under the guidance of Marinus, a hermit. After many years, in which he
seems to have gone to Spain, he returned at last, and took up his hermit
life in a marsh near Classis, where the monks of his old monastery
sought him, and with the help of Otho III made him their Abbot. This
office, however, he did not long retain, for he found it useless to try
to reform them. He seems to have wandered about, famous all over Italy,
founding many houses, but the most famous of all is this house of
Camaldoli, which he founded in 1009. The land was given him by a certain
Conte Maldolo, it is said, an Aretine, by whose name the place was ever
after known, Campus Maldoli; while another gift, Campus Arrabile, the
gift of the same man, is that place where the Hermitage stands. There,
in Camaldoli, Romuald built a monastery, "and by several observances he
added to St. Benedict's rule, gave birth to a new Order, in which he
united the cenobite and eremetical life." It is said that it