How three-year-old girl went missing during a picnic more than 25 years ago with her family still clinging to hopes she is still alive

• Angela Celentano was three when she went missing from family picnic in 1996 

It started like any other summer’s day for the young family – a picnic under the blue skies of the Italian Amalfi coast with the children laughing and playing nearby. 

Laying under the blazing sun as his wife Maria prepared the sandwiches, Catello Celentano smiled lazily at his three-year-old daughter Angela bounding over to him during their trip to Monte Faito near Naples. 

‘Dad, they won’t let me get in the hammock,’ the frustrated little girl told her father to which he replied ‘don’t worry I’ll take you there now’ before turning back to his wife.

That would be the last time Catello saw his daughter, for as he went to reach for her hand, he grasped thin air. She was gone. 

It’s been more than 27 years since that fateful day in August 1996, but the disappearance of the little girl who became Italy’s Madeleine McCann still haunts her parents and locals alike. 

In the decades that have followed, Angela’s anguished parents have waited in vain for any news – any clue – that their little girl is somehow still alive after all this time. 

There have been moments – when members of the public had reported potential sightings or police named suspects – where they allowed themselves to think there was a chance for answers. 

But Angela’s disappearance had become an endless tale of false starts and dashed hopes. Yet her parents have never given up hope, with her father saying: ‘Until I am certain that my daughter is dead, until I have a body to cry on, I will continue to look for her alive. Even if I have to go to the end of the world.’ 

And now, nearly 28 years after their daughter’s disappearance, Catello and Maria are allowing themselves to believe they could have some answers soon after a judge ordered Italian prosecutors to re-examine the case based on clues all the way from Turkey that were never properly investigated by police.

Locals living close to Monte Faito, a mountain nestled between Naples and Sorrento on Italy’s west coast, still remember vividly the details of the chilling cold case that sent shivers through their spines and saw them hold their children a little tighter.

It was on 10 August 1996 that Catello and Maria’s family holiday with friends from the Evangelical Community on Monte Faito turned into one of nightmares when they discovered, hearts racing, that their three-year-old daughter Angela was missing.

Her disappearance made headlines across Italy and the world alike – and sparked a long and botched police investigation that has so far ultimately proved fruitless.

The couple had taken their three little girls – Rossana, six, Angela, three, and Naomi, one – to Monte Faito for a trip with a large group of people from the Evangelical Community of Vico Equense in Naples.

Catello had been laying on the picnic blanket next to Maria when a frustrated Angela approached him and told him: ‘They won’t let me get in the hammock.’

He remembers telling his daughter he’d take her to the hammock before turning to speak to his wife briefly. 

But mere seconds later, when he turned around and reached for his daughter’s hand, that summer’s day turned into one of nightmares – Angela was nowhere to be seen. 

Heart racing, Catello went to the hammock but couldn’t see his daughter’s small frame anywhere, and it was hard to see her among the crowd of people on the mountainside. 

Running back to his wife, Catello told her: ‘I don’t see Angela anymore’. 

The two parents frantically screamed their daughter’s name, asking their friends if they had seen her. Quickly, everyone on the trip began searching for little Angela with the police arriving shortly afterwards. 

Catello and Maria spent days on the mountain searching for their daughter with the help of their friends and police. The Carabinieri, the army, dog units and a police helicopter joined the search efforts – but there was no sign of the little girl anywhere.

Police began questioning everyone who was on the trip, and quickly learned that the last to see Angela were two boys – Renato, 11, and Luca, 12 – with whom the little girl went down a path. 

But their testimonies didn’t match – and later, the boys would change their stories before retracting their statements in the first of an endless stream of mysterious incidents surrounding the cold case.

Even 27 years after Angela’s disappearance, it’s still not clear which of the boys last saw the three-year-old.

Renato had told police he had gone down a path that leads to a carpark to put a ball in a car when Angela insisted on following him despite him telling her not to. 

The boy claimed that halfway down, the path reaches a cross roads, and it was at this point he told Angela to go back to her parents, so he continued the descent alone. Renato claimed that when he walked back to the group after putting the ball in the car, the search had begun for Angela. 

As the search continued, nine days after Angela’s disappearance, an exhausted Catello was at their family home in Naples when his phone rang. 

He jumped for the phone, thinking there might be news, but all he could hear on the other end was a little girl crying and a voice saying ‘your father’ before the call cut off.

A month after the sinister phone call, the little boy Luca, 12, told police that he had met Renato with Angela while he was walking along the path to the carpark. 

Luca had claimed he told Renato to bring Angela back to his parents, but Luca said the boy refused to listen to him and continued on towards the car park with the girl in tow. 

The testimonies didn’t match, and investigators interrogated the two boys separately. But they didn’t change their stories. 

Then, on March 8, 1997 – seven months after Angela’s disappearance – Luca told police how two men had kidnapped the little girl in a dramatic breakthrough in the case. 

‘I immediately started running after the two strangers. The man with curly hair who had the little girl with him took out a knife and pointed it towards me and the girl, telling me that if I spoke or did anything strange they would kill the little girl and my family,’ Luca told the police. 

He added that the curly-haired man had a snake tattoo on the back of his hand while another man had a pigtail. 

Detectives, relieved that there was finally a breakthrough in the case, launched themselves into a fresh investigation focusing on the boy’s claims and trying to find the two men. 

But five days after giving his testimony, Luca mysteriously withdrew everything. He said what he had told police was all ‘the fruit of my imagination’ that was said ‘in the throes of a crisis of conscience’.

Police believed that Luca had been pressured or threatened into withdrawing his statement and continued their investigation into various leads they had discovered.

One of those leads was Angela’s mother Maria telling Maria that the evening before the family trip to Monte Faito, she had heard her 13-year-old niece say: ‘And if tomorrow they catch Angela in the woods?’

The girl’s father, Gennaro Celentano, became the key suspect for aiding and abetting in the kidnapping of Angela together with four family friends. The 13-year-old was interviewed by psychologists who established that she had been repeating details she had heard from adults. 

But the Public Prosecutor’s office in Naples closed the case against Gennaro, saying there ‘are no elements to request his indictment’. 

Meanwhile, another witness told police that on the day of Angela’s disappearance, he had come across a metallic gold-coloured Lancia Prisma car with Perugia license plates driving away from Monte Faito at high speed. 

He said the man driving the car had a pigtail, fitting the description made by Luca before he mysteriously withdrew his testimony.

Yet – despite the leads in the case – police couldn’t come up with any answers.  Angela’s heartbroken parents believed that their daughter had been kidnapped so that she could be illegally adopted. 

The case went quiet for years, but in 2009 Italian investigators were given a tip that blew the investigation open.

An Italian woman, Vinceza Trentinella, told police that Angela was being kept on the Turkish island of Buyikada, near Istanbul, after being kidnapped as a child. 

Trentinella claimed that Angela is living with a man, a self-styled vet, who she believes is her father. She said she was told the information by a dying priest, Don Augusto, who allegedly said it was revealed to him during a confession. 

‘He told me, “I can’t keep this burden on my conscience”,’ Trentinella said at the time. The priest told her about a vet living on the island, who he claimed had kidnapped Angela. 

Trentinella travelled to Buyikada herself and found the vet called Fahfi Bey at a veterinary practice where she had posed as a tourist who wanted to adopt a kitten from the island. It was here that she found who she believes to be Angela. 

‘I knew where to go, what to look for and I found them,’ Trentinella tells MailOnline from her home in Italy.

Speaking about when she discovered who she believes to be Angela and her alleged abductor, she tells MailOnline: ‘It wasn’t easy. He was very nervous. She doesn’t know anything about her life, she thinks the person she lives with is her father.’

Upon her return to Italy, Trentinella notified police and gave them documentation – a business card of Fahfi Bey, who had a scar on his neck, and photos of the girl who had a strong resemblance to Angela. 

Trentinella said the man posing as Angela’s father had written a number on his business card, claiming it was his own. 

But when Italian police, in collaboration with their Turkish colleagues, called the number a man picked up and said he had never met Trentinella.  

It later emerged that this man was in fact called Fahri Dal, meaning that the real Fahfi Bey had given Trentinella had given her a fake number. But despite the discrepancy, Turkish police failed to investigate what could be a key clue extensively. 

The investigations at the time faded for years without finding any concrete evidence of this Fahri Bey.

In the years that followed, that line of inquiry was forgotten, and Angela’s parents were once again left waiting in vain for answers. 

They had to deal with blow after blow after multiple sightings of girls resembling Angela proved fruitless. In 2017, sightings were made in Mexico, and a few years later in South Africa and then in Venezuela. 

Her parents truly believed that a Venezuelan model who strongly resembled Angela’s older sister was their long-lost daughter. But their hopes were dashed when a DNA test found she was not a match in February 2022. 

‘By a bitter twist of fate, there was an impressive resemblance to one of Angela’s two sisters,’ the Celentano’s family lawyer Luigi Ferrandino said at the time. ‘We believed it and hoped it was here, but unfortunately there was a negative DNA result.’

But months later, in January 2023, investigators were forced to revisit their initial line of inquiry into Angela being on the Turkish island of Buyikada with a man posing as her father. 

That was because when the prosecutor’s office had requested a dismissal of the earlier investigation file into the Turkey link, Judge Federica Colucci opposed it and refused to close the last line of inquiry into Angela’s disappearance. 

The judge, of the Court of Naples, ordered prosecutors to investigate the discrepancies in their original probe with Turkish police, sparking some renewed hope for Angela’s parents. 

Angela turned 30 in June 2023 and her parents revealed how they still celebrate her birthday every year and buy her a gift, which they put in her wardrobe. 

They hope that one day, they will be reunited with their little girl after so many years. 

‘It’s been a hard 30 years for us,’ her father said. ‘There isn’t a day that we don’t think about Angela, who has always been present in our lives, even if not physically. We are sure that sooner or later we will hug her again.’