Emanuela Orlandi’s brother’s regrets and the right to know the truth about his sister’s disappearance
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A missing teenager, an empty tomb, a swirl of dark theories, and the closed doors and habitual secrecy of the Vatican. It sounds like fiction, but it is a real-life mystery that has gripped Italy for more than three decades and has embroiled the powerful and inscrutable Holy See.
Pietro and his four sisters had a happy childhood inside the historic Vatican City, where his father was a lay employee in the papal household. “The Vatican gardens were available to us as if it was our own back garden. We felt we were in the safest place in the world,” he said.
On 22 June 1983, Emanuela left the family home, carrying her flute. She had asked her brother to accompany her on the bus to her music class a mile away, but Pietro had other commitments. “It’s a very painful memory – she insisted I take her, and we rowed over it. Then she left, slamming the door. I never thought it would be the last time I saw her. I’ve gone over it so many times, telling myself if only I had accompanied her maybe it wouldn’t have happened.”
For 36 years, the family of Emanuela Orlandi has sought answers about the fate of the 15-year-old girl who vanished from the streets of Rome on her way to a flute lesson.
Later, Emanuela called home, speaking to one of her sisters. Since then, there has been no trace of the teenager, and Italian investigators have been unable to reach a conclusion about what happened to her.
“I am incapable of accepting injustices, but especially when it involves my sister, knowing that over all these years there are people who know what happened,” Pietro Orlandi, her older brother, told the Observer. “For me, the right to the truth and the right to justice are sacred rights that nobody can ever take away.”
Yesterday, in the presence of an expert appointed by the Orlandi family, forensic scientists extracted bones from two ossuaries found last week under a stone slab in a Vatican college. The Vatican said the bones would now be analysed to try to establish their identities.
It is the latest twist in the search for Emanuela which has so far yielded almost no clues, let alone hard facts.
