On a hot summer evening in 1983, a 15-year-old girl named Emanuela Orlandi walked out of her family’s Vatican City apartment and vanished into the heart of Rome. What began as a local missing person case soon spiraled into one of the most intricate, enduring, and disturbing mysteries in modern Italian history.
Over four decades since Emanuela’s disappearance, the search for her has yielded countless theories, dramatic revelations, and devastating false leads, all while spotlighting the opaque inner workings of the Vatican and its uneasy relationship with justice and transparency.
What truly happened to Emanuela? Was she a pawn in a Cold War power game, a victim of Mafia retribution, or silenced to cover up sexual abuse within the highest echelons of the Catholic Church? Click through this gallery to take a look inside the missing case that has haunted Italy for more than 40 years.