Maria Valtorta - Notebooks

Notebooks

From 1943 to 1951 Valtorta produced over 15,000 handwritten pages in 122 notebooks. She wrote her autobiography in 7 additional notebooks. These pages became the basis of her major work, The Poem of the Man God, and constitute about two thirds of her literary work. The visions give a detailed account of the life of Jesus from his birth to the Passion with more elaboration than the Gospels provide. For instance, while the Gospel includes a few sentences about the wedding at Cana, the text includes a few pages and narrates the words spoken among the people present. The visions also describe the many journeys of Jesus throughout the Holy Land, and his conversations with people such as the apostles.

The handwritten pages were characterized by the fact that they included no overwrites, corrections or revisions and seemed somewhat like dictations. The fact that she often suffered from heart and lung ailments during the period of the visions made the natural flow of the text even more unusual. Readers are often struck by the fact that the sentences attributed to Jesus in the visions have a distinct and recognizable tone and style that is distinct from the rest of the text. Given that she never left Italy and was bed-ridden much of her life, Maria's writings reflect a surprising knowledge of the Holy Land. A geologist, Vittorio Tredici, stated that her detailed knowledge of the topographic, geological and mineralogical aspects of Palestine seems unexplainable.