More and more Italian women are choosing to flee from the modern world and taking up hermit’s life, a new study claims.

“There are as many as 1,000 hermits currently in Italy with several hundred more dotted across Europe and the US,” said the study’s author Prof Isacco Turina of the University of Bologna.

Modern version
But instead of sporting long beards and living in caves, modern hermits can usually be found in a city apartment, and is even sometimes connected to the Internet for convenience.

“At the risk of sounding like a caricature, the average hermits are the sort of people who belong on the plains,” Turina said.

Turina tracked down 37 hermits for his study, and published his claims in a book The New Hermits, The Flight from the World in Modern Italy, which has become quite a hit in the entire European Union region. 

According to him, “the rise of the hermits” could be traced to 1983 when the Vatican had offered “full recognition” to those who renounce the worldly life and devote their lives to the solitary “praise of God”.

He said that the solitary life often appealed to “avant-garde” worshippers, and several of the hermits were artists, architects and writers, and around 55-years-old.