ROME – If she’s somehow still alive, today would mark Emanuela Orlandi’s 56th birthday. In the popular mind, however, especially here in Italy, she remains forever fifteen, the age at which she vanished after a music lesson in June 1983, thereby creating the basis for the most celebrated unsolved Vatican mystery of the modern era.
Orlandi, in the phrase made popular by a four-part Netflix series in 2022, was a “Vatican girl” — her father served as a clerk in the Prefecture of the Papal Household, and her family lived in an apartment inside the city-state. Over the forty years since she went missing, her fate has become the Vatican equivalent of the Kennedy assassination, meaning the mother of all mysteries and the focus of a never-ending series of plot twists, purported revelations and conspiracy theories.
