Valentina Zincati, from Bologna, Italy, was born on August 27, 1972. She began The Institutes program when she was seven years old, with a profound midbrain injury. As a result, she had serious respiratory, balance, and mobility problems.
Valentina speaks several languages and is a published poet and author of many articles, short stories, and plays. She has won Italy's highest national poetry award. As she matured as a poet, she wrote, "These poems are no longer innocent descriptions sweet and sad, but are flashes of truth mingled with sensations and deep secrets. Truth and fantasy have become an integrated concept, and this is new for me."
While Valentina is intellectually excellent, she has struggled to overcome her physiological and physical problems. Several years ago she wrote of her struggle: "It is difficult to think of having so long to go before reaching my goal, but it is comforting to have had a past that has already seen a victory."
Equipped with what she has learned during her years on the program, Valentina decided to face her life head on. Because her life dream has always been to be active in the performing arts, as a playwright or stage manager, she began to take classes in creative dancing. In June 1997 she performed on a stage for the first time. The ballet was called "The Goal" and through her performance she clearly showed that she was determined to reach her own goal.
In September 1997, Valentina was chosen, due to her creativity and great physical condition, to be a member of an integrated theatrical workshop held by the most important theater in Bologna. After forty days that included many hours of hard work, she appeared on stage with other injured people, plus professional actors and dancers. For five evenings, they staged a physical performance and acted two plays by G. Buchner.
She attended a course for playwrights while continuing with her university studies and creative dancing.
Valentina has been an inspired fighter all her life who attempts to bring what she has learned to the hearts of others. In 1996 she wrote:
"I'm enrolled at the university, I've lots of friends, and many interests: well, I'm living a full life.
"Sometimes I look back and I realize how every single step towards what I am today has been slow, demanding, and never granted: nothing has been given to me freely.
"I also realize that I could have done nothing without the program.
"Seven years after my difficult birth we heard about The Institutes and we immediately wrote to them, as I had been born brain-injured. I had a severe midbrain injury due to a heavy lack of oxygen at the moment of birth.
"My mobility was zero, nobody (except my parents) could understand what I said, and I couldn't read because of my poor convergence. Nothing could be done for me, everybody said.
"This was my awful situation years ago when, in despair, we arrived at The Institutes and started my program.
"Time has passed away and defeats and victories, failures, and goals achieved have followed one another. In the meanwhile, I've grown up and I've so much improved that I can say I've become another human being. I really owe much of what I am now to my program, and not only from a physical standpoint.
"By making my will stronger and stronger, the program has helped me in my choices and has made me more self-assured, more steady in my ideas.
"The program has given me a real life that, at this moment, is strongly demanding to be lived with responsibility."
