Romuald

Saint Romuald was born in Ravenna in the tenth century, a member of the aristocratic Onesti family. The principal early source for his life is the Vita Beati Romualdi composed by Saint Peter Damian about fifteen years after Romuald's death. According to that account, Romuald's father Sergius killed a relative in a duel over land, and the young Romuald, who had been present, entered the Benedictine abbey of Sant'Apollinare in Classe near Ravenna to do penance. What began as a forty-day retreat became a lasting vocation; he took the monastic habit, though he soon found the community too lax for the austerity he sought.

Leaving Classe, he placed himself under a hermit named Marinus in the Venetian lagoon and embraced a life of severe fasting, manual labor, and psalmody. In the later tenth century he accompanied Marinus and the former doge Pietro Orseolo to the monastery of Sant Miquel de Cuixa in the eastern Pyrenees, where he spent several years in eremitical practice. Returning to Italy, he was drawn into the monastic reform associated with the court of the emperor Otto III. At imperial insistence he briefly served as abbot of Sant'Apollinare in Classe, but he resigned within about a year when the monks would not accept his discipline, and he resumed a wandering life of founding and reforming small monasteries and hermitages across the Italian peninsula.

The foundation that gave his movement a lasting institutional form was Camaldoli in the Casentino mountains of Tuscany, established in the early eleventh century on land given by a local magnate. There Romuald organized a double community: a hermitage of separate cells for solitaries and a cenobium for those living in common, all under the Rule of Saint Benedict. Tradition holds that he adopted a white habit after a vision of monks in white ascending a ladder to heaven. The Camaldolese congregation that grew from this house combined cenobitic stability with the eremitical ideal and became one of the principal expressions of medieval Benedictine reform in Italy.

Romuald continued to travel and to establish other houses, including the monastery of Val di Castro in the Marche, where he spent his final years. He died there on 19 June 1027. His disciples preserved his memory, and Peter Damian's biography spread his reputation as a restorer of hermit life. His relics, reported incorrupt when examined in the fifteenth century, were translated to Fabriano, where they remain in the church of Santi Biagio e Romualdo. His feast, long kept on 7 February in the General Roman Calendar after it was entered there in the late sixteenth century, is now observed on 19 June, the day of his death.