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On June 22, 1983, Emanuela Orlandi, 15, vanished off a central Rome street while she was on her way home from a music lesson.
Home was inside Vatican City, since her father was a Vatican employee. And that transformed what might have been a straightforward missing persons case into one of Italy's most enthralling - and enduring - unsolved mysteries.
It was resuscitated this week after the news media here reported a witness claiming, among other things, that Orlandi had been kidnapped on the orders of the American archbishop Paul Marcinkus, a former president of the Vatican bank. Linked to a major Italian banking scandal in the 1980s, Marcinkus died in 2006.
On Tuesday, the Vatican defended Marcinkus and sternly admonished the media for leaking confidential information "from a source whose value is highly dubious," as a Vatican spokesman, the Reverend Federico Lombardi, said in a statement. The source, Sabrina Minardi, is the former girlfriend of Enrico De Pedis, known as Renatino, a mobster who was shot and killed in Rome in 1990.
But the new revelations confirmed that the Orlandi drama still has the power to rivet Italians - because it is entangled with much larger events.Just weeks after she vanished, the Vatican received an anonymous call from her purported kidnappers demanding that Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, be set free in exchange for her release. Her family still believes this the most likely hypothesis for her disappearance, said Massimo Krogh, the lawyer who represents the Orlandi family.
Investigations into Orlandi's disappearance have examined possible links to Bulgarian agents, the Sicilian Mafia, the KGB, even Roberto Calvi, known as God's Banker because of his association with Marcinkus and the Vatican bank. Calvi, too, met a mysterious end: He was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London in June 1982.
"It's one of the great Italian mysteries that wraps into it all the mysteries of the 1980s, that's why it's so fascinating," said Carlo Lucarelli, a novelist and the host of a television program that revives Italy's buried ghosts. "As soon as you say the name Orlandi it calls up so many stories that Italians still have not forgotten."
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