The Girl from the Vatican: Forty Years of Silence Around Emanuela Orlandi

2026-08-01 · True Mysteries Editorial Desk · Vanished Without a Trace · 8 min read

Emanuela Orlandi was born in Rome on 14 January 1968, the fourth of five children of Ercole Orlandi, a lay employee of the Prefecture of the Papal Household. Because of her father's post the family lived inside the walls of Vatican City. That made Emanuela something very unusual: a teenager who was a citizen of the smallest sovereign state in the world, and who went to school and to music lessons in the ordinary streets of Rome.

She was fifteen, she played the flute, and three afternoons a week she attended the Tommaso Ludovico da Victoria music school in Piazza Sant'Apollinare, a short walk from Piazza Navona. On Wednesday 22 June 1983 she left home at about four in the afternoon for her lesson. Rome was hot and half empty, the school year was ending, and nothing about the afternoon was out of the ordinary.

Reader comments (0)