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BIRTH
Maria Valtorta was born on March 14, 1897 in Caserta, where her parents, who were Lombard, were temporarily staying. She was the only daughter of a Cavalry Marshal, a good and submissive man, and of a French teacher, a shrewish and severe woman. After having risked dying when she was born, the little girl was entrusted to a nanny with bad habits, who went so far as to leave her for hours among the furrows of wheat in the sunny countryside.
The transfer to the north
Having the family to follow the displacements of the Cavalry Regiment in which her father served as an officer, Maria left Caserta when she was eighteen months old, lived her early childhood in Faenza, Romagna, and began to attend schools, with great profit, in Milan and then to Voghera, where she made his first communion.
The mother
From her mother, a former French teacher, a cold and despotic woman, she suffered moral violence and impositions in her life choices.
The Father
From her father, a meek and loving man, she was educated in human values and the admiration of beauty that is in nature and in art.
The childhood
Intelligent and strong-willed, of a passionate nature, Mary nourished the legitimate aspirations of every woman, but in her soul "the eagerness to console Jesus by becoming like Him in the pain voluntarily suffered for love" never died away. As a child, in fact, contemplating the statue of Christ taken down from the cross, she felt compassion for Him for having understood what love for humanity there was in that extreme sacrifice.
The adolescence
Decisive for her spiritual maturity and for a program of future life were her happy four years as a student in the Bianconi College of Monza, where she found herself satisfied in cultural and religious formation.
The College period
Maria Valtorta at the age of 15 in the College's uniform
Florence
Her return to the family coincided with the transfer to Florence, decided by the parents, as the father retired prematurely for health reasons.
The Great War
In the eleven years she spent in Florence, interrupted by a long vacation in Reggio Calabria with hotel keeper relatives, her mother allowed Maria to be a Samaritan nurse in a military hospital for eighteen months (the First World War was raging) but also extinguished in the daughter the dream of being a bride and mother, brutally interrupting a first and a second engagement in the bud.
The Attack
While walking through the streets of Florence, Maria suffered an attack from a socialist fanatic, the man hit her with a iron bar in the spine, at the level of the kidneys, causing paralysis.
In Reggio Calabria
It was then that Maria had the providential opportunity to spend two years in Reggio Calabria, as a guest of hotelier relatives who, with their affection, combined with the natural beauty of the place, helped to restore her body and soul. During that vacation she felt new impulses towards a life rooted in Christ; but the return to Florence in 1922 submerged it in bitter memories.
Viareggio
Maria was 27 when her parents bought a house in Viareggio, where the family went to live permanently.
The infirmity
Her health, undermined by the harsh physical trials, was becoming increasingly unstable, but did not prevent her from engaging in a form of parish apostolate and in charitable works, until her growing love for God and for souls pushed her to the heroic decision. to offer herself victim to divine Love and Justice. A progressive paralysis of the lower limbs, the consequence of a blow to the kidneys received in the street by a subversive when she was in Florence, made her move with increasing difficulty. She became completely ill from Easter 1934.
Maria Diciotti and the loss of the parents
The following year she had the consolation of seeing Marta Diciotti, an orphaned and lonely young woman welcomed into the house, who would become her assistant and confidant for the rest of her life. Just a month later she had the great pain of not being able to get out of bed to be able to assist her beloved father in his last moments of life. The same goes for her mother, who died on 4 October 1943, loved and respected until the last by her daughter, who had only received hardships from her.
The autobiography
In the first months of the same year 1943, Maria Valtorta had written theAutobiography, which had been requested of her by the spiritual director, the servant P. Romualdo M. Migliorini.
The first "dictation"
Immediately after, on April 23, 1943, Good Friday, she had his first "dictation", which marked the beginning of a prodigious literary production in terms of size, height of inspiration, value of content, stylistic value, manner and time of writing.
Writing
Remaining half-seated in bed, paralysed from the waist down, Maria wrote everything in her own hand with a fountain pen on ordinary notebooks placed on arched knees, uninterruptedly for years, without rereading and correcting, while she was exhausted by suffering of all kinds and comforted from raptures of spiritual joy, in a concealment wanted this way so that she could become known only after death.
The second world War
She did not stop writing even when the passage of the Second World War forced her to flee from Viareggio to take refuge in Sant'Andrea di Còmpito (fraction of the municipality of Capànnori in the province of Lucca) where she saw herself transplanted, with the furniture of her room, from April to December 1944.
The isolation
After such an intense activity as a writer, the infirm Maria Valtorta gradually closed herself off in a serene psychic isolation, until she remained completely inactive in her last years.
The contemplative state
It is attributed her new state to the offer of her own intellect, attested in one of her letters, and to a promise of Jesus, reported in a "dictation" of 1947, when for her the "visions" of the major work seemed finished: “I will always come. And for you alone. And it will be even sweeter because I will be everything for you ... I will take you higher, into the pure spheres of pure contemplation ... From now on you will only contemplate ... I will forget you about the world in my love ".
Birth to Heaven
She died in her home in Viareggio on 12 October 1961, as if obeying the word of the priest who recited the prayer for the dying: "Leave, Christian soul, from this world". She was 64 years of age and had been in bed for 27 and a half years.
Back in Florence, for ever.
Twelve years later, on 2 July 1973, the mortal remains of Maria Valtorta, moved from the Cemetery of the Misericordia in Viareggio, were buried in Florence, in the Chapter chapel in the large cloister of the Basilica-Sanctuary of the Ss. Annunziata.
The tomb at the Santissima Annunziata
The officiant is the famous mariologist Father Gabriele Maria Roschini of the Order of the Servants of Mary.
