ROMUALDO, saint. — Camaldolese Benedictines (v.), born in Ravenna around 952, died in the hermitage built beside the monastery of Val di Castro (Fabriano) on 19 June 1027. At the age of twenty he abandoned the world in order to become a Benedictine at S. Apollinare in Classe (Ravenna). After three years of communal life, he asked and obtained permission to become a hermit with a certain Marino, among the hills of the Veneto.
In the company, therefore, of his own abbot, the doge of Venice Pietro Orseolo, and numerous other companions, R. soon afterward fled to the distant cenobium of Cuxà in Spain. Having returned to his homeland about ten years later to confirm his aged father in his religious vocation—the latter having become a monk at S. Severo after having ruled as duke in Ravenna—R., upon his father’s death and through the intervention of the emperor Ottone III, was elected (998) abbot of S. Apollinare in Classe. Having abandoned this dignity the following year, R. journeyed to Montecassino and then, with renewed ardor, resumed the reform of monastic life and the foundation of new Italian monasteries and hermitages. In Romagna he erected the cenobium of Verghereto, then a second one near Rome; in 1001, the hermitage of Pereo at Ravenna; and afterward those of S. Michele di Lemmo, Valdicastro, and S. Elena in the Cassinese region. Among those in the Umbrian, Tuscan, and Marchigian lands, the hermitage of Vallombrosa was particularly renowned, Camaldoli (v.), founded in 1012 under the eponymous Congregation, distinguished by the white habit it used.
Not long afterward, having been recognized as innocent of a perfidious accusation, for which he had also suffered imprisonment in his monastery of Sitria, he was summoned by Enrico II to direct the Sienese convent of S. Salvatore. There R. erected beside it the hermitage of Vivo; farther away, that of Vallebona. In 1015 R. began the monastery of Fonte Buona. Feast: 7 February, the day of the translation of his body to Fabriano (1481).