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Holy seat of the Catholic Church for some and territory of dark secrets for others, the Vatican City is, perhaps, one of the nations that hides the most mysteries within. From macabre exorcisms to links with criminals, homosexual bishops and strange disappearances of children, behind that “facade of the nerve center of Catholics”, the smallest country in the world hides countless unsolved enigmas.
Emmanuela Orlandi It is the name that, four decades later, continues to reverberate through the corners of the Pope’s home and eclipsing international media news. She is not about a beatified saint, nor is she just another girl from the city-state: for this moment and for many years, her name has been synonymous with crime, injustice and mafia.
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More than a mystery, for now, indecipherable. The disappearance of this 15-year-old girl has become the struggle of her relatives, who cry out for justice; in the challenge of investigators, who explore even the smallest clue; and in the latent fear of Italian citizens, who have not known peace since that June 22, 1983 in which Emanuela left her music class never to return, at least alive.
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Emanuela Orlandi: she left never to return
June 22, 1983 was a gloomy day for the inhabitants of Vatican City, but especially for the Orlandi family, who did not imagine that Emanuela, just a 15-year-old girl, would mysteriously disappear after attending her flute class. in the conservatory of Piazza San Apollinaris, in the center of Rome.
Emanuela was the fourth of five children. Her father, Ercole Orlandini, worked in the Vatican Prefecture organizing papal audiences, according to the media ‘HuffPost Italia’; while she was fifteen years old, she not only took music lessons, but she was part of the choir of the Sant’Anna dei Palafrenieri church, the parish seat of the Vicariate.
— Emanuela Orlandi case
pt 1In 1983, Emanuela Orlandi disappeared in Rome. Subsequent investigations involved the Vatican.
Due to this, they were forced to open the tombs of 2 German princesses of the 19th century, since they thought that Emanuela’s body was there pic.twitter.com/WmKinxs1Kh
— ????The Zombie II???? (@DimeFred2) October 16, 2022
The last thing that is known is that she was last seen at a bus stop in the center of Rome -some witnesses point out that he was getting into a dark-colored BMW- and, later, he vanished without leaving any trace.
Her brother, Pietro Orlandi, confessed to the ‘BBC Mundo’ network that the last time he saw her was under not-so-pleasant circumstances: “We had a fight because she had a music class. It was so hot, I refused to go with her because I had other things to do. She slammed the door shut and left. That’s the last memory I have.”
Although, initially, the authorities did not consider Emanuela’s disappearance to be a kidnapping -because they thought that perhaps she could have escaped to meet a boyfriend-, little by little, the days accumulated to give way to anguish, sadness and , of course, to the less hopeful theories.
Would I be dead? Had she been kidnapped by a member of the Vatican or, rather, by a criminal gang? Where would they have buried her? Is there no safer place than where the Pope lives? These are some of the questions that have plagued the Orlandi family for years. Pietro, in particular, has fought tirelessly to get to the bottom of the truth, even if it means going up against the highest authority in the Catholic Church.
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“With Pope Francis, the wall got higher. I met him a few days after he was elected (in 2013) and he told me: ‘Emanuela is in heaven’”, Pietro Orlandi told ‘BBC Mundo’ just three years ago.
And I add: “I thought: ‘Pope Francis knows something.’ Then I filled out all kinds of requests to meet him again for an explanation.. But he never wanted to see me again.”
The data collected by the investigators linked the event with the secret services of other nations, pedophilia and mafia activities within Italy; however, what shocked public opinion the most was learning that the Vatican might have covered up all these events.
Tombs of princesses and other theories of the case of Emanuela Orlandi
Almost four decades after the start of the investigation, there are many theories that have emerged around the suspicious, mysterious and unsolvable disappearance of Emanuela. Perhaps the moment when he was closest to knowing the truth of the case was in 2019 when an enigmatic letter reached the hands of the Orlandi family.
“Look where the angel indicates”, was the brief but revealing description that accompanied the image of an angel on the tombstone dedicated to Princess Sofía and Prince Gustavo von Hohenlohe, who in 1857 was appointed archbishop by Pope Pius IX.
Without thinking twice, the Orlandi family decided to make a request, which was granted by a state court, to exhume the tomb of Princess Sofia von Hohenlohe -which is located in the German cemetery within the Papal State-; however, what they found was even more bleak: there were no human traces or funerary remains of Emanuela and neither of the royal.
The adjacent tomb, in which Duchess Charlotte Frederica of Mecklenburg-Schwerin was buried, was also opened but, as had happened with the first, it was also empty.
“Honestly, I had my doubts that we could find Emanuela’s remains there, but opening those tombs and not finding even those of the princesses has increased the problems. Above all for the Vatican”, Pietro Orlandi assured the ‘Chronicle’ section of the Spanish outlet ‘El Mundo’ and, once again, showed his non-conformity with the case that has been sinking into a host of speculations, false leads and labyrinths No Exit.
“The people who for more than a year told us that my sister was buried there, They must give explanations because they are not anonymous, they are important people within the Vatican”, Pietro told the aforementioned medium.
As reported by Laura Sgrò, the family’s lawyer, the tomb of Sofía von Hohenlohe could have been opened at least once, since both the date of the statue and that of the tombstone did not coincide, according to an investigation carried out by the family after receiving the letter.
To the list of hypotheses about the disappearance is added one that could be related, nothing more and nothing less, than with the Italian mafia. At the time, the possibility was considered that Emanuela could have been kidnapped by members of the Banda della Magliana, a criminal organization headed by Enrico De Pedis, a powerful Italian gangster and criminal.
According to the testimony of ex-mafioso Salvatore Sarnataro given in 2008, De Pedis ordered his son – Marco Sarnatoro – to follow the young woman, capture her and take her to the Eur lake district in Rome with the aim of handing her over to another criminal boss.
Along the same line of investigation, Sabrina Minardi, a former lover of “Renatino” -as Enrico De Pedis was also known- assured in 2005 that, supposedly, she had been the mastermind of Emanuela’s kidnapping.
Four years later, specifically in 2009, she would have given the Rome Prosecutor’s Office a revealing confession: allegedly, she was in charge of putting the young woman in her car and taking her to the place where her lover told her.
The American magazine ‘GQ’, for its part, assures that the disappearance of the young Italian woman could be part of a plan “to pressure the Vatican to pay a loan that they had made to finance an organization dedicated to fighting communism.” , and it was even said that the girl was part of a plan to secure the release of Mehmet Ali Ağca, the man who shot Pope John Paul II.”
The disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi is a case that, after four decades, continues to generate even more questions than answers among researchers, journalists and citizens throughout the world.
Although, for a long time, it seemed to have been buried in the past, Netflix was in charge of bringing to the present a story in which mysteries and labyrinths with no exit stand as the main protagonists.
The Vatican Girl: The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi.
(1 season)Rome, 1983. After leaving a music class, 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi disappears, embroiling the Vatican in a decades-long mystery.
???? https://t.co/O5eJzN2Yqf pic.twitter.com/r2ztWNreLH
— Netflix News (@NewOnNetflix) October 20, 2022
‘The Girl from the Vatican’ is the documentary series that promises to cover, chapter after chapter, the enigmas that surround the mysterious disappearance of Emanuelaa fifteen-year-old who apparently took the dark secrets of the Vatican to her grave.
Directed by the Australian writer, producer and writer Mark Lewis, it will feature the participation of Pietro Orlandi -Emanuela’s brother- and Andrea Purgatori, a journalist who, from the beginning, was dedicated to the investigation of the case.
Source: Elcomercio
I, Ronald Payne, am a journalist and author who dedicated his life to telling the stories that need to be said. I have over 7 years of experience as a reporter and editor, covering everything from politics to business to crime.
