Romuald of Ravenna

Romuald was twenty when he saw his father kill a man in a duel: he withdrew for forty days to the abbey of Classe, took the habit there, and left three years later, finding the observance lax. He then spent half a century crossing Italy, founding and reforming hermitages, thought insufferable by those he reformed and followed by those who fled him. Around 1012 he established in the Tuscan Apennines the hermitage of Camaldoli, where he united under one rule a cluster of hermit cells and a cenobitic monastery — his real invention. Peter Damian, who never knew him and entered Fonte Avellana eight years after his death, wrote his life from testimony some fifteen years later.