Once again, mystery comes to Italy. Brenda, the transexual involved in the sex scandal which led the Governor of Lazio, Piero Marrazzo, to resign, was killed in her own flat in Rome. Her mobile phones were stolen, while her laptop was left under a running tap, in an attempt, it is thought, to destroy images of orgies involving Brenda and some politicians. The police, as in every good crime fiction, is still investigating.

Every country has a string of unresolved cases. Every country has its own mysteries, which at first shock to then slowly become a curiosity to search for on Google or Wikipedia. However, as the judge and writer De Cataldo has recently written, Italy seems to have way too many. Stories where domestic and foreign secret services cross paths with criminals, terrorists, politicians and the Vatican. Stories which may have never happened in the way we imagine them, or may have been much worse than what we dare thinking. 

In the past, one could label these mysteries as contingencies. They were, in a sense, understandable because of the strategic importance of Italy during the Cold War, of the importance of keeping the country on the right side of the system of international relations. However, cases such as Brenda's show that, far from being a contingency, mystery is an essential part of Italian politics. Perhaps a symptom of some of the frailties of its democracy.

The best antidote against this pessimist inertia would come from a real interest of the media to this latest mystery. Brenda's story is capturing the front page of newspapers, and some of the best investigative journalists, such as Sandro Ruotolo, Carlo Bonini and Fiorenza Sarzanini, are following the case. However, the story is starting to lose attention, to slip down the home pages of the newspapers' websites. 

This should not happen. The solution of mysteries such as Brenda's are the testing ground not for the quality of a country's police force, but for the quality of a country's democracy, and media have a fundamental role in pressing for this to happen. If this was not the case, Italy will be, once again, the country of too many conspiracy theories and of too few answers.