The Camaldolese, the forest and the protection of natural

In a period in which environmental protection and sustainability are considered among the greatest emergencies on the planet, many refer to the example of Saint Francis of Assisi (1181 or 1182-1226), also relaunched by Pope Francis through the encyclical Laudato si' (2015), entirely centered "on caring for the common home" through the proposal of an "integral ecology". Not everyone, however, knows of another religious experience, that of the Camaldolese, which for centuries has inspired proper forest management and their protection on the basis of a balanced relationship between man and nature. The experience of the Camaldolese is based on the magisterium of St. Romualdo (circa 952-1027), charismatic reformer of the Benedictine Order, who, seeking an ever higher degree of perfection in the spiritual life, found in the mountains and in the forest the western equivalent of the ascetic experience of the desert, characteristic of the East. Between 1023 and 1026, in the upper Casentino, in the heart of the Tuscan-Romagnolo Apennines, Romuald built a hermitage in the middle of a forest in the locality then called Camaldoli, at about 1000 m of altitude. Shortly after, three kilometers below, he founded a monastery, which was to constitute a filter between the hermitage and the "world", in addition to becoming the place dedicated to the administration of goods and the reception of guests, pilgrims and sick people. Since their first establishment in Camaldoli, Romualdine monks-hermits had a privileged relationship with the forest, a symbol of solitude and communion with the entire creation. The growing desire to preserve, expand and enrich the forest heritage with care and competence has produced over the centuries a series of concrete rules, aimed at governing the management and protection of the natural environment in which the Camaldolese found themselves working. These norms were never codified in a single book dedicated expressly to silviculture, but are found scattered in the rules and constitutions that the monks-hermits gave themselves to discipline their religious life over the centuries, as well as in a myriad of minor documents, of "scattered sheets", which testify to the conjugation of ethical and spiritual motivations with the technical, economic, social and legal problems that the concrete management of the forest posed. The set of these rules is today indicated with the expression "Camaldolese Forest Code", coined by the Romualdine monk Giuseppe Cacciamani in the 1960s. The first testimony of the close relationship between the religious and the forest is contained in the second legislative text of the Camaldolese, the Liber eremitice regule ("Book of the Hermitic Rule"), dated to the third quarter of the 12th century, by Rudolf II-III, so called because prior general of the Camaldolese for two times, from 1152 to 1158 and in 1180. The chapter entitled "The meaning of the seven trees" proposes the existential identification of the Camaldolese with the seven trees planted by God in the desert, mentioned by the prophet Isaiah (41, 19) according to the exegesis of Gregory the Great: to acquire the necessary virtues in the search for perfection, the hermit must "become" himself a cedar, an acacia, a myrtle, an olive tree, a fir tree, an elm and a boxwood, in a process of authentic symbiosis between man and the natural environment. Since then and until the incorporation of the Camaldoli forest into the heritage of the Italian State, following the suppression of religious corporations in 1866-1867, all subsequent legislative texts of the Camaldolese will also contain provisions concerning forestry. The first organic collection of rules, the work of Paolo Giustiniani Regula eremitice vite ("Rule of the Hermitic Life"), published