In July 2022, Valeria Valverde, a 21-year-old Costa Rican student in Florence, Italy, suffered a serious bicycle accident while riding through the city center. As a result, she sustained a severe traumatic brain injury that left her in critical condition. She underwent emergency craniotomy to relieve pressure on the brain, and doctors considered her chances of survival very low.
The intercession of Carlo Acutis
While Valeria remained hospitalized, her mother, Liliana Valverde, traveled to Assisi to ask for the intercession of Carlo Acutis. Six days after the accident, on July 8, 2022, she arrived at the young man’s tomb in the Sanctuary of the Renunciation. There she knelt, prayed for hours and left a letter with her request. Carlo Acutis had died in 2006 at the age of 15 from leukemia, was beatified in 2020 and was known for his religious devotion and for using the internet to spread content of faith.
The recovery
On the same day Liliana arrived in Assisi, the hospital reported that Valeria had begun breathing spontaneously. The next day, doctors observed that she was beginning to regain movement in her upper limbs and some speech. Her progress continued against initial expectations. On July 18, a CT scan showed that the brain hemorrhage had disappeared. On August 11 she was transferred to rehabilitation and her recovery advanced rapidly: she spent only a week doing physiotherapy. By September, just two months after the accident, she had fully regained her health. On September 2, 2022, Valeria and her mother returned together to Assisi to give thanks at the tomb of Carlo Acutis.
Investigation and official recognition
Valeria’s recovery 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 a scientific evaluation and then a theological investigation. In this case, the process concluded that Valeria’s healing 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 stated that it was a healing linked to a young Costa Rican woman who had suffered a very serious head injury after a bicycle accident. This recognition was decisive because it became the second miracle attributed to the intercession of Carlo Acutis, a necessary requirement for his canonization.
Context and relevance
The first miracle attributed to Acutis had been the healing of a Brazilian boy, Matheus, who suffered from a severe congenital malformation of the pancreas. That case led to his beatification in 2020. Valeria’s case was the one that definitively opened the path to his canonization. Finally, Carlo Acutis was canonized on September 7, 2025, during a ceremony held in the Vatican. Since then, he should no longer be referred to as “Blessed Carlo Acutis,” but as Saint Carlo Acutis. In 2025, Valeria took part in the canonization ceremony and was invited to be part of the celebration. Her story became closely linked to that of the young Italian and she became one of the protagonists of the process that led Acutis to the altars. For the Catholic Church, that recovery was officially recognized as a miracle. For Valeria and her family, it was an experience that changed their lives forever. The journey that began that early morning in July 2022, with a fallen bicycle on a street in Florence and a young woman gravely injured, ended years later with the canonization of the saint to whose intercession the Church attributed her healing.
Original source: www.parati.com.ar (published on August 28, 2026)
