VALLOMBROSIANS  , an

order of monks under the Benedictine rule, founded by St John Gualbert in 1038 . He was son of a Florentine nobleman, and became first a Benedictine and then a Camaldulian . Finally, about 1030, he withdrew to Vallombrosa, a shady dale on the side of a mountain in the Apennines, ro m. from Florence, and for some years led a completely solitary. life . Disciples, however, gathered around him, and he formed them into an order in which the cenobitical and the eremitical lives should be combined . The monks lived in a monastery, not in separate huts like the Camaldulians, and the Benedictine rule was the basis of the life; but the contemplative side was strongly emphasized, and every element of Benedictine life was eliminated that could be supposed to interrupt the attention of the mind to God—even manual labour . The Vallombrosians spread in Italy and France, but they never had more than sixty houses . They now have three, with some sixty monks in all . The habit was originally grey, but it became black; and the life also has been assimilated to that of the Benedictines . There were some convents of Vallombrosian nuns . See Helyot, Histoire des Ordres religieux (1718), v. cc . 28, 29; Max Heimbucher, Orden u . Kongregationen (1907), I .

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