A new book by Italian sociologist Isacco Turina describes a growing trend in Italy: women embracing eremitism to become hermits. A Telegraph article (and there are others) sums up the book:
Professor Isacco Turina, a sociologist at the University of Bologna, tracked down 37 hermits for his work: “The New Hermits, The Flight from the World in Modern Italy.”
He said there are now as many as 1000 hermits in Italy, with several hundred more dotted across Europe and the US.
Turino’s research showed that the women were usually in their fifties, that most had dropped out of convents because they were dissatisfied with some aspect of Catholic practice, and lived in their own apartments. The women hermits were often writers or artists who had quit the rate race sometime between their thirties and fifties.
URL: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/13/whermit113.xml