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‘Vatican girl’: Italy’s Senate approves new inquiry into Orlandi disappearance

Senators voted almost unanimously on Thursday to set up a new joint parliamentary inquiry into the case of teenagers Emanuela Orlandi and Mirella Gregori who vanished in 1983.

Published: 10 November 2023 09:39 CET
Emanuela Orlandi
People hold placards with Emanuela Orlandi's portrait at the end of the Pope's Angelus prayer in Rome's St. Peter's Square. Photo by Vincenzo PINTO / AFP

The vote for the commission was taken by a show of hands in the Senate chamber, with one abstention (Pierferdinando Casini, Centrists for Europe) and one vote against (Roberto Menia, Brothers of Italy).

Plans to create the commission were started in March shortly after the Netflix documentary ‘Vatican Girl’ pushed the mystery shrouding Orlandi’s disappearance and the lesser-known Gregori’s further into the public eye.

READ ALSO: Rome opens new investigation into ‘Vatican Girl’ disappearance

Orlandi’s brother Pietro told reporters he was “happy” with the vote: “I was waiting for this news with confidence. This commission will be able to do so much more than the Vatican enquiry can do.

“I am convinced that we will get to the truth, it cannot be hidden forever. I thank the senators who voted for the Commission.”

Democratic Party lawmaker Dario Parrini stated: “We have a duty to guarantee the two families involved and the entire country that tenacious work will be carried out on events that for decades have been the subject of serious interference and very heavy misdirection.”

Emanuela, who went missing at the age of 15 after a flute lesson, was the fourth child of Ercole and Maria Orlandi. The family lived inside the Vatican grounds, with Ercole Orlandi working for the Vatican.

Gregori was also 15 years old when she went missing, a month after Orlandi.

The disappearance of the two teenagers has been dubbed “Italy’s most famous unsolved mystery,” with decades of speculation including suggestions that mobsters, the secret services or a Vatican conspiracy were to blame.

There have been three investigations opened over the forty years, from 1983 to 1977 and then 2008 to 2015, and the third reopening in May 2023.

The city’s Public Prosecution Office has gone back to investigating the case, with Orlandi’s uncle Mario Meneguzzi currently under investigation after Orlandi’s sister Natalina accused him of sexually abusing her when she was younger.

The Vatican, which has been accused of obstructing investigation efforts over the past decades, is currently conducting their own inquiry into the disappearance.

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CRIME

Italy remembers anti-mafia judge Falcone on 32nd anniversary of bombing

Italy on Thursday paid tribute to anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone, who was killed by the Sicilian mafia on May 23rd, 1992, in a car bomb murder that shocked the country.

Published: 23 May 2024 11:30 CEST
Italy remembers anti-mafia judge Falcone on 32nd anniversary of bombing

Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi and Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano were in Palermo on Thursday morning to attend the inauguration of the Museo del Presente (‘Museum of the Present’) – a new museum focusing on the legacy left by Falcone and his colleague Paolo Borsellino, who was also killed by Cosa Nostra in 1992.

Authorities in Palermo were set to lay a wreath outside the city’s Pietro Lungaro police station at 1pm to honour the memory of the three escort agents who were killed in the attack. 

Another official ceremony was set to take place in the late afternoon in via Notarbartolo, in front of Falcone’s former Palermo residence, with participants expected to observe a minute of silence at 5.58pm – the exact time of the 1992 bombing.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella, whose brother Piersanti was murdered by the mafia in 1980 while serving as Sicily’s regional president, said in a statement on Thursday morning that the Capaci bombing was an outright attack “on Italian democracy” which sparked a nationwide “mobilisation of conscience” . 

He said that the names of those who were killed in the bombing are “etched in our history with indelible characters” and serve as “a statement of commitment to a conclusive victory over the mafia cancer”.

READ ALSO: How murdered judge Giovanni Falcone shaped Italy’s fight against the mafia

The life lessons taught by Falcone and his colleagues have demonstrated that the “mafia can be defeated and is bound to end” but “it is necessary to keep our guard up” to prevent mafia associations from “taking root in grey areas” of the state, Mattarella added.

Italian Judge Giovanni Falcone (2nd-L) arrives in Marseille, France

Italian Judge Giovanni Falcone (2nd-L) arrives in Marseille, France, in October 1986. Photo by GERARD FOUET / AFP

Mattarella’s words came just two days after former Carabinieri General Mario Mori was placed under investigation in connection with a series of mafia bombings that killed a total of 10 people and injured 40 more in 1993.

According to prosecutors in Florence, Mori had been notified of plans from the Sicilian mafia to carry out attacks in multiple locations around Italy, including Florence, Rome and Milan,  but failed to both give the “due warnings and notifications” and carry out “pre-emptive investigations”.

The Capaci attack was the first in a series of car bombings orchestrated by the Sicilian mafia from May 1992 to July 1993.

The mob used a skateboard to place a 500-kilogramme (1100-pound) charge of TNT and ammonium nitrate in a tunnel under Sicily’s A29 motorway, which linked the Punta Raisi airport to the centre of Palermo.

Falcone, driving a white Fiat Croma, was returning from Rome for the weekend. At a look-out point on the hill above, a mobster nicknamed ‘The Pig’ pressed the remote control button as the judge’s three-car convoy passed.

The blast ripped through the asphalt, shredding bodies and metal, and flinging the lead car several hundred metres.

Falcone, his wife, and three members of his police escort were all killed instantly.

Less than two months later, on July 19th, Falcone’s colleague and close friend Paolo Borsellino was also killed in a car bomb attack, along with five members of his escort. Only his driver survived.

Falcone and Borsellino posed a real threat to Cosa Nostra, an organised crime group which boasted access to the highest levels of Italian power.

The two judges were later credited with revolutionising the understanding of the mafia, working closely with the first informants and compiling evidence for a groundbreaking ‘maxi-trial’ in which hundreds of mobsters were convicted in 1987.

The killings, just 57 days apart, resulted in a huge outpouring of public grief in Italy and sparked a major crackdown against the Sicilian mafia, ultimately leading to the 1993 arrest of boss Salvatore Riina, who had orchestrated the Capaci bombing.

Riina died in jail in 2017.

“The civic and cultural revolution that went along with the state’s crackdown dealt a hard blow to Cosa Nostra, which still bears its consequences to this day,” the president of parliament’s anti-mafia commission Chiara Colosimo said on Wednesday.

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