Camaldoli Hermitage

Romuald founded this around 1024 as a compromise between the hermit's solitary life and the monastery's common one: the hermitage is a walled enclosure of individual cottages, each with its own small garden and chapel, where monks live separately and meet for services. Below it, at a lower altitude, sits the monastery proper with a guesthouse and a sixteenth-century pharmacy still fitted with its wooden cabinets. The Camaldolese wrote forestry rules in the thirteenth century requiring replanting of the silver fir they cut, which is why the surrounding forest is as old and intact as it is.

What you actually see

• The cottage cells - separate hermit houses inside one walled enclosure.
• The ancient pharmacy - a sixteenth-century dispensary with original fittings.
• The monastery below - the communal house at a lower altitude.
• The planted firs - forest managed under medieval replanting rules.

When to go

May to October; snow closes the roads in deep winter. The hermitage enclosure is only partly open to visitors and services run through the day.

Honest expectations

Most of the hermitage is closed to visitors; only the church and one cell are shown. It is a place of silence with rules on noise and photography.

Nearby

La Verna lies south; the Casentino forests surround it.