The posters with the face of the Vatican citizen who died on 22nd June 1983 have covered Italy for months. The reason? A series released a few months ago on Netflix, Vatican Girl, rekindles the spotlight on the Emanuela Orlandi case, still full of mystery. Her brother, Pietro Orlandi, through an interview, told the unpublished details of the story.

“When I first met production three years ago, nobody knew about it. It was Netflix that banned it. A person inside the Vatican called me to say: But Peter, are you participating in a documentary about the story of Emanuela?”

I denied it and asked why. 'Because in the Vatican this rumor...there is a little alarm, they are afraid of something". Confess Pietro Orlandi, brother of Emanuela Orlandi, the Vatican citizen who died on June 22nd, 1983, only 15 years old. A still unsolved case, which today returns to the center of the public debate for the release – last October 20th – of a docuseries entitled "Vatican girl".

The Vatican girl, but also the girl (kidnapped by) the Vatican: this is precisely the thesis carried out in the four episodes. " While in Italy they were trying to silence history", explains Pietro Orlandi "now I will air all over the world. In 160 countries at the same time and this will be the turning point".

An international case, with a thousand unsolved tracks, misdirection, and twists told by the family but also by the well-known Italian journalist Andrea Purgatori. In fact, in January, the Vatican reopened the case, almost forty years after his death; the promoter of Vatican justice Alessandro Diddi together with the Gendarmerie decided to reopen the investigation of a story that has shaken the Holy See and its highest institutions, in a judicial and investigative process that has touched on disturbing hypotheses of all kinds.

The aim of the investigators is to examine all the files, documents, reports, information, and testimony again. 360-degree work to leave nothing unresolved, to try to clarify shadows and questions of all kinds, and finally put an end to this tragic story. The work plan provided by the office of the promoter of justice will start from the data acquired process and will follow new tracks and old indications at the time not too thorough: In short, the work will start from the examination of every single detail starting from that afternoon of June 22nd, 1983 when a 15-year-old girl, Emanuela Orlandi, daughter of a Vatican employee, disappears into thin air.

She had closed the door of her house behind her at 16.00 pm on that day in early summer to go to music class in Piazza Sant'Apollinare in Rome. Near the homonymous basilica where many years later it was discovered that one of the leaders of the gang of Magliana (a famous criminal group in Rome since the 1960s) was buried, 'Renatino' Enrico De Pedis, according to several witnesses executing the kidnapping «on behalf of high prelates».

Was it a sexual lead? Prostitution? Pedophilia? Blackmail? Over the years several generations have wondered what the truth was and to this day, in 2023, still, Italy and the world are not aware of the truth. "In all these years, the Vatican has preferred to suffer rather than collaborate. At the cost of not undermining its image," Peter says. The trinomial Church/State/Crime has always been narrower than we think. The hope, with the opening of this new file, is that we can finally arrive at a breakthrough on the case.