Forty years ago, a teenaged Italian girl went missing and she has never been seen since.

It was on 22 June 1983, when Emanuela Orlandi, the daughter of a lay employee at the Vatican, did not return home after a music lesson in Rome. She was 15.

Last week, the Vatican said that new leads “worthy of further investigation” had surfaced hopes of finally getting to the bottom of one of the Holy See’s most notorious mysteries. Whoever watched the docu-series Vatican Girl knows how years of investigation have so far led to nowhere.

At the time of her disappearance, I had just finished – or was about to finish – my set of “O” level examinations at the end of my secondary school years. Emanuela was just over one year younger than me.

I already had a passion for news, and I remember regularly tuning in to Rai and the then-newly-established Canale 5 for details. For those too young to remember the early 1980s, there was no internet, which makes news items and developments available immediately at the click of a button. There was no social media either and one had to wait for news bulletins to know what was going on. The evening’s Telegiornale was the one many waited for to see what had happened during the day.

In the first few days following her disappearance, I had confidence that she would have been found safe and sound. Actually, I was sure that she would have returned to her home.

But she never did.

As the days became weeks, and the media’s attention turned elsewhere, hopes faded. Emanuela’s vanishing, in my personal world, was the watershed moment between the time when everything ended with “and they lived happily ever after” and “the world is a place where a few stories end well, but many others do not”.

In the years prior to the Emanuela Orlandi disappearance, which has remained unsolved to this very day, there were two other tragic events which took place in Italy during my school years, and which also left an indelible mark on me.

The first was the kidnapping of Italian politician Aldo Moro, and his subsequent assassination, and the second was the death of Alfred Rampi, known more as Alfredino, who fell into a well and died three days later after all rescue attempts failed.

Moro was abducted in Via Fani in Rome on 16 March 1978 by a militant organisation known as the Brigate Rosse. His five bodyguards were also killed. The statesman, who had served as Italy’s prime minister for four-and-a-half years in the 1960s and another 18 months in the mid-70s, was found dead in the boot of a car on 9 May. The Italian government had refused to release prisoners in exchange for Moro.

My memory of those 54 dramatic days is of me, still aged 11, returning home from school and waiting for the mid-afternoon news highlights to find out the latest information. And, each day, I remember my dismay that nothing had changed, while my hopes that “it will all end well” remained intact. When, then, Moro was found killed at the back of a red Renault – TV, in 1978, was still in black and white, so the newscaster had to describe the colour of the vehicle – it was a total shock. (And it pains me that the younger generations of today think that Aldo Moro is just the name of a road in Marsa. There is a big story behind that name.)

I was older when Alfredino fell into that well on 10 June 1981, and his ordeal was much shorter than that of Aldo Moro, but the memory of those three days in which Italian media coverage was solely concentrated on Vermicino, a village near Frascati, some 20 kilometres outside Rome, is still clear.

And, again, it was traumatic to learn that the six-year-old boy had not been saved, and died on 13 June. Imagine what he went through as he slipped further down the well while rescue efforts, including the drilling of a parallel hole that was to enable rescuers to reach out to him from below, failed. Such a horrible death, with the boy’s body recovered a month later, on 11 July.

When Moro was killed I was too young to grasp the extent of what was happening, the political events that led to it and all the ramifications of what became known as the “anni di piombo” (years of lead), a period in Italy’s history that produced so much violence and militancy between the 1960s and early 1980s. As the drama was unfolding, as an innocent child, my only thoughts were that Moro would have been released, alive and well, and everything would go back to “normal”.

When Alfredino died, I could not understand why the rescuers did not manage to find a way to lift the boy out of the hole he had fallen into. Again, I was sure that, as in all books I was reading at the time, there would have been a happy end to that story. I was not prepared for the eventual tragedy. Didn’t everything end well?

Closer to home, other incidents took place in the years that straddled the 70s and 80s, and which I vividly remember also because of their “vicinity” – the murder of Karin Grech in 1977, for example, killed by a package bomb addressed to her father, not far from where I lived at the time, so much so that we shared the same postman. And the attack on the Eddie Fenech Adami home in 1979, with two of his sons attending the same college I was being educated in.

All are events that marked my childhood, and all must have served to unconsciously instil in me the sense that the world was completely different from that which was described in books. I could not realise it then. They raised so many questions which I could not understand, much less answer.

It was the Emanuela Orlandi vanishing (the latest to happen from the list of incidents mentioned, and which therefore found me more mature) that however was the seminal moment which made me jump into the reality of what life is all about. It’s not the world dreamt about as a child and, sadly, since then it has become progressively worse.

Orlandi remains missing. A few days ago, on the 40^th anniversary of her vanishing, the Vatican’s criminal prosecutor, Alessandro Diddi, said he had recently forwarded to prosecutors in Rome all the relevant evidence he had gathered in the six months since he reopened the investigation. His office interrogated people who held positions in the Vatican 40 years ago. His office “has proceeded to examine the material, confirming some investigative leads worthy of further investigation and transmitting all the relevant documentation, in recent weeks, to the Prosecutor’s Office in Rome, so that the latter may take a look at it and proceed in the direction it deems most appropriate”.

We wait, but it’s been a long time since hope turned to deep distrust.