Medieval (9th–11th century)
Feast: June 19
He watched his father kill a man in a duel, fled to a monastery in horror, and spent the rest of his life trying to find a silence deep enough to drown out the memory.
Romuald was a young nobleman from Ravenna when his father, Duke Sergius, killed a relative in a dispute over property. The sight of the killing drove Romuald into the monastery of Sant'Apollinare in Classe for forty days of penance — his father's penance, technically, but Romuald was the one who couldn't stop seeing it. He stayed. He became a monk, then grew restless with the community's laxity. He sought out a hermit named Marino and lived under his harsh guidance for years. Then he wandered. For the next several decades, Romuald moved from place to place — founding small communities of hermits, staying briefly, then moving on when the community grew comfortable or when conflict flared. He was attacked by monks, accused of wrongdoing, and at one point fell into such deep depression that he couldn't pray for five years. Around 1012, he founded the hermitage of Camaldoli in the Tuscan Apennines — a cluster of individual cells in a forest, with a monastery below for those not yet ready for full solitude. It was his answer to the question that had driven him his whole life: how to combine the fire of the desert fathers with the stability of Benedictine life. The Camaldolese order survives today. Romuald died alone in his cell in 1027, which is probably how he wanted it.