Valtorta’s House
Maria Valtorta's Bedroom
To Maria's soul, faithful and generous, Jesus offers Himself, as He says on October 27, 1943:
“Here, in your room, where your faith shines more than a lamp and your love gives off perfume more than incense, I have placed my cradle, my little cradle, which contains Me, large as in Heaven. […] Maria, make your house a Nazareth and a Bethany. It already is because I am there, and make it more so with a complete love for your Eucharistic Jesus. Illness is not an obstacle for the loving heart. There are numberless churches where I am alone. Come into them with your spirit. Make up for others’ lack of love.”
The entrance
There now remains only the great peace of being here. It is as if the house were embracing me…and, along with the house, my dead loved ones, and I with them‑I rediscover “my” little Paradise, lost in April, and all of them return, as then. And all of them for me.
Maria Valtorta
The dining room
Jesus says to Maria, after the forced evacuation for the War:
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, through your constant presence make this dwelling a house in Nazareth. Heart of Jesus, Heart of Mary, and Heart of Joseph, give us your love and take ours. Save us now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
“You shall say this to reconsecrate the house, and you shall have each and every room blessed. And remember—you and those who are with you—that where we are there must be nothing which can wound our holiness.”
Notebooks, 28 December 1944
The staircase
Coming back from St Andrea di Compito:
And then the moment of departure…and the moment of arrival. To see my house…. I foresaw that my nerves would be shattered. I have always foreseen this. And I was not mistaken. Shattered to the point that, like a bitter river in a lake of honey, waves and waves of pain, of all the pain I have had in this house, of all the pain from being torn away from it, and of all the pain in that terrible exile, and also the memories of past days, the deaths of my mother and father…and so many, many other things…all fell upon my heart together, a heart which was already exhausted by excessively intense joy, and I wept and wept and wept for twenty-four hours without being able to restrain myself.
The kitchen
The facade on Via Antonio Fratti
I call this the house of my love, and it is. Here I have loved God, knowing Him more and more, to the point of my current knowledge as his spokesman. Here I received his first caresses, which marked me, I believe, even organically. Here I learned to love the Mother as She should be loved. Here I became the little John.828 And now Jesus has consecrated it for me by calling it the “house of Nazareth.”
Maria Valtorta
The garden
Toward the end of September Marta Diciotti Goes quickly to the house in Viareggio and in the garden she founds a blossoming geranium. She picks up a flower and brings it to the evacuated Maria in St Andrea di Compito, due to the extensive bombings in Viareggio, and so she writes:
The first flower to bring me joy after six months minus fifteen days in which the most beautiful flowers have left me indifferent. A poor, small, half-withered white geranium, another one of those my mother looked at, those that grew in the earth of my flowerbed, brought almost entirely by my father! A poor flower and so beautiful for me!
Notebooks, 27 September 1944
