The play is loosely based on the 2012 New York(May 14, 2012) article about the kidnapping of 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi.

I went to the Theater for the New City in the East Village to see Mario Fratti's

According to Times article, there are three theories about what happened to Emanuela:

1. One theory has it that she was kidnapped on the orders of an American archbishop, Paul C. Marcinkus [d. 2006], a former president of the Vatican bank who was linked to a major Italian banking scandal in the 1980s.





2. Others cite an anonymous phone call the Vatican received weeks after Emanuela’s disappearance, demanding the release of Mehmet Ali Agca, the [alleged Islamic extremist] gunman who shot Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square in 1981, in exchange for her release.





3. Lastly, in 2005, an anonymous phone call to a television program implied that Emanuela had been kidnapped as a favor to Cardinal Ugo Poletti [d. 1997], who in 1983 was the vicar general of Rome. The caller also mentioned that Emanuela's kidnapping could have been related to the Italian mafia. (The BBC (14 May 2012) reported that the girlfriend of Enrico De Pedis, an Italian gangster, claimed that De Pedis kidnapped Emanuela in an effort to extort money from the Vatican.)



