The story of Valeria Valverde began with an accident and ended up becoming one of the best-known cases linked to Saint Carlo Acutis.
In July 2022, the Costa Rican young woman was 21 and studying in Florence, Italy, where she had lived since 2018. One night she fell from her bicycle while riding through the city center and sustained a severe traumatic brain injury.
Her condition was critical. She had to undergo an emergency craniotomy to relieve the pressure on the brain, and the doctors considered that the chances of survival were very low.
While Valeria remained hospitalized, her mother, Liliana Valverde, made a decision that would become central to the story: to travel to Assisi to seek the intercession of Carlo Acutis.
Valeria’s Mother’s Journey to Assisi
Six days after the accident, on July 8, 2022, Liliana arrived in Assisi and headed for Carlo Acutis’s tomb, at the Sanctuary of Dispossession.
There she knelt to pray for her daughter and left a letter with her request. According to later Vatican accounts, she spent hours praying in front of the young man’s tomb, entrusting Valeria’s recovery to him.
Carlo Acutis had died in 2006, at the age of 15, from leukemia. He had been beatified in 2020 and was known for his religious devotion and for using the internet to spread faith-related content.
What happened next became the starting point for the investigation that years later would lead to recognizing the miracle.
The Day Recovery Began
On the very day Liliana arrived in Assisi, the hospital delivered an unexpected news: Valeria had begun to breathe spontaneously.
The following day, doctors observed that she began to regain movement in her upper limbs and also some of her speech. Her progress continued in the days that followed, defying the initial expectations.
On July 18, a computed tomography scan showed that the brain hemorrhage had disappeared. On August 11, Valeria was moved to rehabilitation and her recovery advanced rapidly.
The young woman remained in physiotherapy for barely a week. By September, just two months after the accident, she had fully recovered her health.
On September 2, 2022, Valeria and her mother returned together to Assisi to thank at Carlo Acutis’s tomb.
The Church’s Investigation
Valeria’s recovery then began a long process of medical and religious investigation.
For a healing to be officially recognized as a miracle within the Catholic Church, the case must undergo scientific evaluation and then a theological investigation. In this case, the process concluded that Valeria’s cure had no sufficient medical explanation and could be attributed to the intercession of Carlo Acutis.
On May 23, 2024, Pope Francis authorized the promulgation of the decree that officially recognized the miracle. The Vatican noted that it was a healing linked to a Costa Rican young woman who had suffered a gravely traumatic brain injury following a bicycle accident.
The recognition was decisive because it became the second miracle attributed to the intercession of Carlo Acutis, a necessary prerequisite for his canonization.
From Carlo Acutis to Saint Carlo Acutis
The first miracle attributed to Acutis had been the healing of a Brazilian child, Matheus, who suffered from a severe congenital pancreatic malformation. That case paved the way for his beatification in 2020.
Valeria’s case was the one that definitively opened the path toward his canonization.
Finally, Carlo Acutis was canonized on September 7, 2025, during a ceremony held at the Vatican. Since then, it is no longer appropriate to refer to him as “Blessed Carlo Acutis,” but as Saint Carlo Acutis.
The Story Valeria Carried to the Vatican
The young woman who had stood at the edge of death returned to her daily life and continued with her projects. Her story, however, remained closely linked to that of the Italian youth.
In 2025, Valeria participated in the canonization ceremony of Carlo Acutis and was invited to be part of the celebration. The young woman thus became one of the protagonists of the process that led Acutis to the altars.
Her story also became associated with an image that sums up the entire episode: a mother who traveled to Assisi when her daughter was on the brink of death, knelt before Carlo Acutis’s tomb, and prayed for her recovery.
For the Catholic Church, that recovery was officially recognized as a miracle. For Valeria and her family, it was an experience that forever changed their lives.
And the journey that began on that July morning in 2022, with a bicycle lying in a Florence street and a young woman gravely injured, ended years later with the canonization of the saint whose intercession the Church attributed to her healing.
