Maria Valtorta

Maria Valtorta (14 March 1897 – 12 October 1961) was a Roman Catholic Italian writer and poet, considered by many to be a mystic. She was a Franciscan tertiary and a lay member of the Servants of Mary, and reported personal conversations with, and dictations from Jesus Christ.

In her youth she traveled around Italy due to her father's military career, who eventually settled in Viareggio. In 1922, at the age of 25, while walking on a street with her mother, a delinquent youth struck her in the back with an iron bar for no apparent reason and in 1934 the injury eventually confined her to bed for the remaining 28 years of her life. Her spiritual life was influenced by reading the autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and in 1925, at the age of 28, before becoming bedridden, she offered herself to God as a victim soul.

On Good Friday 23 April 1943, she reported the sudden voice of Jesus speaking to her and asking her to write. From then until 1951 she produced over 15,000 handwritten pages in 122 notebooks, mostly detailing the life of Jesus, as an extension of the gospels. Her handwritten notebooks containing close to 700 episodes in the life of Jesus were typed on separate pages by her priest and reassembled, given that they had no temporal order, and became the basis of her 5,000 page controversial book the Poem of the Man God.

Valtorta lived most of her life bedridden in Viareggio, Italy where she died in 1961. She is buried at the grand cloister of the Basilica of Santissima Annunziata in Florence.