In Styria it is related that those who gathered around him, all lived so devoutly, that the rage for mortification reached even to the herdsmen and shepherds of the neighbourhood, who vied with the monks and hermits in all the exercises of the religious life, fasting, keeping silence, and administering the discipline to each other with great zeal and earnestness. On which Peter Damian ejaculates, "Oh! holy time of Romuald! in which, though the torments of persecution were unknown, yet there was no lack of spontaneous martyrdom!"
The whole career of Romuald from the time of his profession, is one continuous illustration of the two-fold force of reality in religion--a force of attraction on the one hand, of repulsion on the other. We see in him one, who in the depth and fervour of his penitence, stedfastly adhered through a long life to his first renunciation, not only of the pomps and vanities of this world, but of the most necessary and innocent refinements of life, and by the mere force of reality drew after him crowds of disciples of every class, and peopled the waste places of his native land with monks and hermits. We see, on the one hand, those in whom the grace of a true vocation responded to the example and teaching of their master, led on by degrees to vie with him in the fervour of his self-devotion; and those, on the other hand, who sought in monasticism only a coward's refuge from the temptations and trials of secular life, repelled almost at once by the stern thoroughness of his religion, and by their own unreality forced into rebellion against his rule.
At the age of 102 he visited the Apennines, seeking a new retreat, and one day falling asleep beside a fountain in a pleasant plain among the mountains, he dreamed that he saw a ladder set up between heaven and earth, up which his monks ascended in white habits. On awaking, he resolved to change the colour of the dress of his monks, and to found a monastery on the spot. It was the property of a gentleman named Maldoli, who at once gave it him, and the monastery was called Campo Maldoli, whence the order assumed its name of Camaldoli.
Romuald died on June 19th, 1027. He is said to have attained the age of 120, but this has been disputed with every show of reason by Bollandus and Baronius. He died in his monastery of the Val di Castro, in the Marches of Ancona, and was there buried. The elevation of the relics took place in 1467, and they were translated to the Church of S. Blase, in the town of Fabri, where they remain to this day. The Roman Breviary celebrates his festival on the day of the translation, which took place in the year 1481.