The Holy Hermitage and Monastery of Camaldoli are situated in a thousand year-old forest of the Tuscan-Romangese Appennines. A scene of extraordinary beauty that instils quiet and expands the spirit, it is an image of Camaldoli's hisotyr and spiritual identity.

    Founded between 1024 and 1025 by St. Romuald, a Benedictine monk (+1027), it sank its roots into the ancient monastic tradition of the East and in the West found in St. Benedict (5th and 6th centuries).

    Camaldoli joined the communal and solitary dimensions of monastic life, as seen in the Holy Hermitage and the Monastery that form one community. The traditional emblem, formed by two doves drinking from the same chalice, expresses symbolically this communion within diversity, nourished by a relationship with God.
Broadening this communion, the Monastery of St. Gregory al Celio in Rome is also today an integral part of the community of Camaldoli.

    Through its genuine vocation, Camdloli has developed and presently is working out its function as a bridge between the eastern and western monastic traditions. With vatican Council II, it returned to being a privileged place for ecumenical and interreligious dialogue:

    Dialogue with Judaism and Islam, with Hinduism and Buddhism, with men and women not formally belonging to any specific religion, but in sincere interior seeking.….

    On his pastoral visit to the Holy Hermitage on September 17, 1993, holy father John Paul II encouraged the monks to develop the dialogic dimension of monasticism, present in almost all religious experiences.

    Camaldoli represents itself as a "community in dialogue and hospitable", following the original inspiration of St. Romuald and, with convinced determination, the entreaties of Vatican Council II.;

    In this picture of articulated dialogue, it has found new impulese for a fertile relationship with the local Church and the area near Arezzo.

Camaldoli lives between memory and the future
It is an open, little beginning
    For more than fifty years, generations of monks have pledged to this, people like the exceptionally charismatic Fr. Benedict Calati (+2000) who gave the Camaldolese community and so many friends a great breath of renewal and hope.

    Wouldn't you like to work together with other brothers in the monastic life for the Lord and Gospel witness?

    Camaldoli is the motherhouse and spiritual reference point for a network of ten male communities in Italy, USA, Brazil and India. Each of them interprets the common Romualdian and Camaldolese inspiration according to its own culture and local Church. Together they from the Camaldolese Congregatin of the Order of St. Benedict.

    Some female monastic communities in Italy, Poland, France, Tanzania, USA, India and Brazil recover the common spiritual patrimony of St. Romuald and Camaldoli.
Between the two branches of one Camaldolese family, they are developping various forms and initiatives of fraternal collaboration at the spiritual and pastoral levels.