eremo delle grotte - vivo's home

vivo is headquartered at the "eremo" Study and Conference Center. The center is housed in a hermitage dating back to 1522 that is situated in the picturesque Marche region of Italy. The hermitage is not only a place for study, conferences and training but also an ideal environment for healing and therapeutic activities

Please visit the Eremo’s website to find out more.

historical account of the hermitage of the caves of the frati bianchi
It was in the Eremo delle Grotte, or Heremitage of the Caves (also known as Heremitage of the Frati Bianchi), located in the Corvo valley between Cupramontana and Poggio Cupro, that the monks led a life of prayers and forgiveness. The caves and their location and dedication can be traced in documention dating back a 1000 years.
It was there that in 1520 Beato Paolo Giustiniani laid the first foundations for the monastic congregation of Monte Corona; in 1526 the Heremitage played host to Ludovico and Raffaele Tenaglia who later collaborated in founding the order of the Capuchin friars.
The monastry in its entirety was restructured at the end of the 17th century by the monastic architect father Apollonio Tucchi.
During the Napoleonic occupation, 1810 1822, and later because of the decree of 1866 which suppressed the religious bodies, and due to the evasive legislation during the unification of Italy, many items of artistic value were removed from the Monastery. Thus the monks, upon their return in 1874, neither found their rich library nor the ceramic altar of the Della Robbia school. Parts of the rich cultural heritage of the monastery can nowadays be found in the public library of Cupramontana, in the Pinacoteca of Jesi, or in private house holds.
As documented in the volume by Ceccarelli "le strade raccontano", apart from the Beati Giovanni Maris, Matteo Sabbatini, Paolo Giustiniani, Ludovico and Raffaele Tenaglia there were also other guests at the heremitage of the caves, namely Beato Antonio da Recanati, Beato Girolamo da Sessa (the doctor of Leo X), Giustiniano da Bergamo and other hermits which were beatified.
The hermitage which was always close to the heart of the people of Cupramontana, was also a fountain of inspiration for authors and poets such as Luigi Bartolini, C. Corradi, F. Bonci.
For decades now the monastery of the "Frati Bianchi" is crumbling under the influence of the weather and the passing of people slowly giving up its structure and its special natural ambience built up over centuries by the patient hermits.
The Eremo S.r.l. Society was born in the 1970's to save and restore an important piece of the history of the Marche and of the cultural and religious civilization of Italy, and in fact the world.
The vivo foundation takes over in the year 2000, uniting under its name a number of illustrious scholars dispersed in universities around the world, with the aim of researching the effects and cure of trauma caused by man-made and natural disasters.
The vivo foundation intends to make the Hermitage of the Frati Bianchi the centre of research for Psychotraumatology, thereby providing continuity though maybe motivated by different reasons for the goals for which the Hermitage had been founded, namely to create a space where the genesis of knowledge and expression combines with the striving for divine serenity.