The monastic settlement of Camaldoli consisted of a monastery placed near a famous spring, Fonte Buona, and of a hermitage, the Eremo, which was situated further up among the mountains. One of the reasons of Romuald’s success lay in his refounding hermit life on a new basis--it is one mark of a genius to turn existing tendencies to new and profitable account. In the monastery all were made welcome; to the hermitage those were promoted whose temper proved their fitness for a solitary life. At the present time only a small wing of the monastery was inhabited by the monks, who rented it from the Government, the vast conglomerate of buildings having been turned into a hotel. But the hermitage up among the mountains was still entirely occupied by them. Up there lived those who were able to endure the privations of hermit life; up there they remained till, weakened by old age, they came down to the monastery to be tended in sickness, and after death their mortal remains were carried back to the Eremo to be buried in the ancient burial-ground.
The account of the life of St Romuald, which was written by St Peter Damian, who belonged to the following generation, gives curious glimpses of the attitude of men’s minds in a far-distant past. It is never easy to transport one’s self to the moral and ethical standard of another age, for the actions of the men who then stirred up the emotions and aroused enthusiasm can be very differently interpreted; in one aspect they are heroes, in another they are faddists. It is in this respect with Romuald as with the holy man of another age, Diogenes the Cynic. Looked at from one point of view, the courage with which Diogenes acted up to his convictions, the cheerfulness with which he bore the hardships of slavery, and the simplicity of life which he affected, bear the stamp of grandeur. Looked at from another side, he is a man of oddities and eccentricities. Prompted in a like direction, Romuald launched forth against misdeeds, discarded every comfort, and commanded respect from the most powerful. But his behaviour also appears absurd if we fix our minds on the way he courted dirt, weakened himself by fasting, and wore himself out by imaginary conflicts with the devil. And there are other points of similarity between the cynic of classical antiquity and the saint of early Christianity. The cynic called himself a citizen of the world, and the word cosmopolitan is held to be his invention; while the saint exaggerated the power of his efforts so vastly that “he looked forward to the time when the whole world would be transformed into a hermitage, and the mass of the nations united in one monastic order.” Both men were praised for their undisturbed serenity under tribulation, and both in unabated vigour reached the extreme limits of old age.