24 Facts About Maria Valtorta

Maria Valtorta was a Franciscan tertiary and a lay member of the Servants of Mary who reported personal conversations with, and dictations from, Jesus Christ.

Maria Valtorta lived much of her life bedridden in Viareggio in Tuscany where she died in 1961.

Maria Valtorta is buried at the Basilica of Santissima Annunziata in Florence.

Maria Valtorta is best known for her 5,000 page book The Poem of the Man-God, first published in 1956 and later titled The Gospel as Revealed to Me.

Maria Valtorta was the only child of parents who had both been born in the Lombardy region.

Maria Valtorta's father, Giuseppe, was in the Italian cavalry; her mother, Iside, was a teacher of French.

In 1900 her father's regiment moved to Milan and the Maria Valtorta family lived in Lombardy until his retirement about 12 years later.

In 1907 the regiment moved to Voghera where Maria attended school and where the park "Gardens of Maria Valtorta" was inaugurated in her name in 2013.

In March 1909, just before her 12th birthday, Maria Valtorta was sent to the Collegio Bianconi boarding school in Monza, just north of Milan.

Maria Valtorta studied there until March 1913 when just before her 16th birthday she had to leave Lombardy with her family for Florence, in Tuscany, due to her father's retirement from the military.

The First World War started about a year after the Maria Valtorta family had settled in Florence, and Italy entered the war in April 1915 on the side of the allies.

In 1917 Maria Valtorta volunteered as a Samaritan nurse, and for 18 months worked at a military hospital set up in Florence to care for the wounded soldiers who had returned from the war.

In March 1920, when she was 23 years old, Maria Valtorta was walking on a street in Florence with her mother, when the young and delinquent son of her mother's dress maker struck her in the back with an iron bar and shouted a slogan against the wealthy and the bourgeoisie.

In October 1924, when Maria was 27 years old, the Valtorta family moved from Florence to Viareggio, on the coast of the Mediterranean, as part of her father's final retirement.

Maria Valtorta's father died in 1935 and her mother in 1943, after which she was mostly alone in the house, with Martha Diciotti taking care of her to the end of her life.

From 1943 to 1947 Maria Valtorta hand wrote about 15,000 pages in her notebooks, 10,000 of which were later selected as the basis of her main book The Poem of the Man-God, and the rest were gradually organized and published after her death.

Maria Valtorta wrote her text in a series of 122 school notebooks purchased for her by her priest.

Maria Valtorta used a fountain pen to write in her numbered notebooks, but did not write the episodes for her Poem in chronological order, and instead included markings as to how they should be ordered after the book had been completed.

Maria Valtorta was initially reluctant to have any of her handwritten notes published but in 1947 her priest convinced her to agree to their publication.

Joachim Bouflet states that most of Maria Valtorta's life is known "only by the autobiography she wrote when she was 46 years old".

Maria Valtorta died in 1961, at age 64, and was buried in the town cemetery in Viareggio.

Maria Valtorta's best known book is The Poem of the Man God.

Maria Valtorta wrote that the lessons were given to her by Azariah, her guardian angel.

Separately, the Maria Valtorta Foundation was formed in 2009 in Viareggio by Fr.