The autograph notebooks are the most precious part of the Valtortian heritage. They show how and with what means Maria Valtorta wrote and document the authenticity of her writings that can be compared with the fidelity of their publication.
Marta Diciotti inherited all the works of Maria Valtorta and the copyrights. Since 1986, Marta Diciotti had made a will in favour of the Valtortiano Publishing Center, which upon her death, in 2001, came into possession of the manuscripts and anything else that completed the hereditary axis of Maria Valtorta.
The Centro Editoriale Valtortiano (CEV ) was set up to be the editor of the writings of Maria Valtorta. Receiving the entire inheritance of Valtorta, partly by will and partly by having purchased it, the CEV almost identified with her person, combining the rights and duties of a publisher with the rights and duties of an author.
THE NOTEBOOKS
The notebooks, which are not identical to each other except in groups, in turn mixed with completely different copies, among which there is even an accountant’s register (n. 92). Not infrequently, the pages of the notebooks are supplemented by sheets folded inwards and inserted with seams. These are all signs of the difficulties in times of war and displacement, that made difficult to stock up even on notebooks.
The total of the manuscript pages, calculated with accuracy also to rectify the errors of the hand that numbered the pages, proves, if it is compared to the period used to write them, that it is a draft made in a cast, without pauses to reflect, for reread or correct.
FROM MARIA VALTORTA TO THE HERITAGE FONDAZIONE
The Centro Editoriale Valtortiano (CEV), which became the owner of the autograph notebooks by testamentary disposition, has conferred the ownership of the same to the Heritage Foundation, established in 2010 by the same CEV and by the spouses Emilio Pisani and Claudia Vecchiarelli, historical editors and curators of the works by Maria Valtorta.
The Foundation, which keeps the notebooks with the utmost care, also wanted to preserve them from the wear and tear of time by reproducing their pages with the technique of digitization, intended to create the safest electronic archive alongside the paper archive. This catalog is an illustrative memory that supports the double conservation, always subject to unpredictable deterioration, of Maria Valtorta’s autographed notebooks.
THE HOUSE IN VIAREGGIO
Guard Father [Migliorini] the memory of me in the hearts and make them give me suffrages. Protect, if the house remains standing, the respect for my room in which so much celestial life took place. Those walls are sanctified by the gaze of God, of Mary and of the saints of God. Oh! I will never be able to forget that these walls have vanished to let me see Heaven and the Holy Father and the triumphant Son, that they are filled with the radiance of the Dove and the celestial harmonies and that Mary’s breath and her voice caressed those walls! I will never be able to forget that they are impregnated with the sound of the Word of the Word! More than a church they were for me, because here the Eternal Priest had preached His doctrine and had me attend His Mass: the Passion.
The house was inherited by the Servants of Mary with the clause that Marta Diciotti could use it for life. The House was subsequently sold by the Servants of Mary to the Valtortiano Publishing Center which, again, gave it to the “Erede Foundation”
