Camaldoli

CAMALDOLI. - A famous hermitage situated almost at the summit of the Tusco-Romagnan Apennines, at 1111 m above sea level. Its name derives from Campus amabilis and Campus Malduli. Maldolo was the owner of the Casentine mountain ridge, which he donated to St. Romuald in 1012 after the vision of a ladder by which monks clothed in white were ascending and which rested precisely on the spot where the sacred Camaldolese hermitage stands, as the ancient rules written ca. 1085 relate.

The construction is characteristic for the dwellings of the individual religious, separated from one another by a small kitchen garden, which later served as models for the future charterhouse of St. Bruno and for the other Camaldolese hermitages. The church was consecrated in 1027 in Romanesque style, rebuilt almost ex novo in 1220, and transformed into the Baroque style, as it is at present, in 1658. In it one admires a marble bas-relief by Mino da Poppi, two tabernacles by Guido da Settignano, a terracotta by Andrea Della Robbia, a pontifical throne in carved walnut, and a canvas by Augusto Mussini. The library and the archive, once very rich, were annihilated by the Napoleonic and Italian suppressions.

The life led there has always been very austere. Almost continuous prayer, silence, fasting, and penance have always drawn up there, for over nine centuries, chosen souls who have given living testimony to Jesus Christ by reliving his mysteries, with no other desire in this world.

The hermitage, called by long tradition by the appellation "sacred," is the mother-house of the Camaldolese Congregation. Popes and emperors enriched it with privileges and donations. Among the former, Alexander II, Paschal II, Gregory IX, Eugene IV, and Leo X distinguished themselves; among the latter, Otto IV, Lothair III, Frederick I, Henry VI, Frederick II, Charles IV, and Sigismund. The Republic of Florence took it under its protection in 1382 and exempted it from impositions in 1446.

At about three km further down, in an inlet between the Muschioso (1157 m) and the Coiozzo (1301 m), lies the cenobium of Ponte Buono (816 m), so called from its very fresh and healthful waters, before it appropriated the name of C., on account of a supposed existence there of a "house of Maldolo." It was built, like the sacred hermitage, by the same St. Romuald ca. 1015 as a hospice and guest-house, in order to leave the hermits intent solely on the contemplative life; then it was organized into a true and proper cenobium and called the archicenobium of C.

The great building comprises: at the center the church, a construction of the 16th century, reworked in the 18th century and adorned in-

-ternally with works by G. Vasari; on the south side extends the building currently used for spiritual retreats for the clergy and the Catholic laity; on the north side the dwelling of the religious, the refectory with the large canvas by Pomarancio, and the cloister.

From as early as 1520 the cenobium had its own printing press and from 1543 a pharmacy, with an attached laboratory, rich in carved furniture, which even at present boasts excellent products of liqueurs distilled from the herbs and resins of the centuries-old forest: elixir, laurus, fir tears, and of medicines.

Since 1946 a well-equipped laboratory for the restoration of books has been operating there: parchments, incunabula, manuscripts, printed works.

It was a benefactor of letters with its academy (15th century) and of social economy through the cultivation of the great forest, rightly called the queen of the Apennine forests; it never forgot the works of charity, building and maintaining hospitals and assisting in various ways the common indigence. In the ancient Camaldolese rules — that is, of all the monasteries dependent on C. — it was made obligatory that every monastery have a hospital with at least 30 free beds for the poor. But the Napoleonic suppression first, and the Italian one afterward, have almost extinguished the vitality of that institute, which is now slowly reviving.

Since 1866 the buildings of the hermitage and of the cenobium, together with the forest, belong to the state domain. - See Pl. XXVII.

Anselmo Giabbani