FLORENCE, Italy — For nearly 600 years, Dominican friars in Florence, Italy, have inhabited the Convent of San Marco, one of the city’s great spiritual and cultural hubs, renowned for its frescoes by Fra Angelico and once home to the fiery preacher Girolamo Savonarola.

But at the end of September, this storied occupation will end, a victim of the dwindling ranks of the Dominican order. The convent’s only remaining residents — four aging friars — have been told to pack their bags and move across town to the convent of Santa Maria Novella.

“The community of San Marco is no more, it is finished,” said the Rev. Fausto Sbaffoni, one of the four, who arrived here in 1979 and was present in June when the regional chief of the Dominicans arrived to read the order suppressing, or closing, the convent. “No friar can remain in a suppressed convent,” he noted.

The Roman Catholic Church is making similar hard choices around the world, though rarely in a place with such a historical and artistic legacy. The church is struggling with a worsening shortage of clergy — what the Vatican calls the crisis in vocations — especially in Europe and North America.