Vanishing – Into thin air

Scomparso. Disappeared. Verschwunden. Disparu. Desaparecido. 

Every year millions of people vanish. Suddenly, there is no trace of them. Vaporized. 

Into the blue, swallowed up in a crevasse of time and space, from which there emerges not the slightest signal. 

But behind each name on a forgotten file in police archives, there lies a story, a home, a place of origin, friends and family, abandoned in a limbo of questions without answers. 

Pietro Orlandi is one such family member. The story of his sister Emanuela, Vatican citizen who mysteriously disappeared in Rome on the afternoon of 22 June 1983 and has never been found since, is one of the most notorious and obscure of these ‘cold cases’. 

Enquiries have involved the Vatican, the highest offices of the Italian State, the Vatican Bank, the mafia and the secret services of various countries. But Pietro and his family have never given up their struggle to get to the truth. 

This mission has made Pietro Orlandi the perfect protagonist for this series. In each episode, Pietro gets onto the track of a vanished person and tries to restore to them a body, a face, a life – and also the right to exist and to be remembered. He does this by meeting those who have loved, known or merely fleetingly seen the vanished person, as well as by exploring the places the person belonged to and from which, unexpectedly one day, they just disappeared.