Valeria Valverde: Severe Brain Trauma Resolves After Pilgrimage to Carlo Acutis Tomb

On July 2, 2022, Valeria Valverde, 21, a Costa Rican student studying in Florence, suffered a catastrophic head injury in a bicycle accident. She was taken to hospital, underwent an emergency craniotomy to relieve intracranial pressure, and was admitted to intensive care. Physicians told her family she might die at any moment.

Six days after the accident, her mother traveled to Assisi to pray at the tomb of Blessed Carlo Acutis — a Milan-born teenager who died of leukemia in 2006 and had been beatified in October 2020. On the day of the mother's prayer, Valeria began breathing independently. The next day she recovered movement in her upper limbs and partial speech.

Valeria was discharged from intensive care ten days later. Imaging taken at that point showed the brain bruising had completely disappeared. She required only one week of physiotherapy. On September 2, 2022 — two months after the accident — she visited Acutis's tomb in Assisi with her mother. Pope Francis recognized the miracle on May 23, 2024. Carlo Acutis was canonized on September 7, 2025, alongside Pier Giorgio Frassati.

The medical complexity: TBI outcomes in young adults are highly variable. Rapid recovery from severe TBI is uncommon but not unknown, and brain contusions do resolve on imaging as a normal healing process. What makes this case unusual is the combination of injury severity, speed of recovery, and the timing of the inflection point matching the family's prayer. None of these alone is inexplicable; their combination is what the Vatican Dicastery found extraordinary.