After Iran chosen ones a calm president last year, Cecilia Sala, Italian journalisthe thought that things might have changed in the country, which he had learned from afar.

For two years, Iran denied his request for a journalist’s visa, but granted him one after the election. His colleagues and friends told him that Iran’s new government appears to be open to foreign media as it seeks to improve relations with Europe.

Mrs. Sala, 29, has not traveled to Iran since 2021, before that attack led by women and girls wanted the end of the rule of religious leaders. So he flew to Tehran, the capital of the country.

“I wanted to see with my own eyes what had changed,” he said in a recent interview in Rome.

Instead, he saw for himself what had not changed.

On December 19, while he was preparing an episode of his daily Italian podcast, two agents from the intelligence wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps came to his hotel room in Tehran. When he tried to get hold of his phone, he said someone threw it to the other side of the room.

He was blindfolded, Ms. Sala said, and taken to the notorious Evin prison, where many of Iran’s political prisoners are held and some are tortured.

At one point, when asked what he was accused of, he said, “he did many illegal things in many places.”

Iran used it arrest of foreign and dual citizens as the cornerstone of its foreign policy for almost fifty years, since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Prisoners – journalists, businessmen, aid workers, diplomats, tourists – are slaves that Tehran supports with other countries to exchange prisoners for cash.

Mrs. Sala was afraid from the beginning that she had been caught to change.

He said he had read that Italy had arrested an Iranian engineer three days earlier at the request of the United States. engineer, Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, wanted for his role in providing drone technology to Iran that was used in an attack that killed three American soldiers in Jordan.

He said: “I got caught up in a bigger game than I was.

Mrs. Sala said she is worried that if the United States insists that Mr. Abedini be released from the country, he may be in prison for many years, his release according to the decision of the American president, Donald J. Trump.

In Evin, the guards gave Mrs. Sala a prison uniform, she said – a gray tracksuit, a blue shirt and trousers, a blue hijab and a long veil called a chador. He grabbed his glasses, without them he was blind.

There were two blankets in his room and no mattress or pillow. The lamp was always on, he said, and he couldn’t sleep.

Only a few days later, when he looked at the yellow walls of his cell inch by inch, he saw blood, similar marks, he said, probably left by a previous prisoner writing the dates, and the word “freedom” in Farsi.

He was blindfolded and interrogated for hours almost every day while sitting facing a wall, he said.

The interviewer spoke flawless English, he said, and showed he knew Italy well by asking him if he liked Roman or Neapolitan pizza.

She was allowed to speak occasionally with her parents and her boyfriend in Italy, she said, and when her mother told reporters there about her daughter’s condition in prison, the interviewer told Mrs. Sala that because of those words, Iran would imprison her. very long.

“Their game is to give you hope, and then use your hope to break you,” said Ms. Pray.

Through the small opening in her bedroom door, she said she heard crying, vomiting, footsteps and a thump that sounded like someone running and hitting her head on the door.

“I thought that if they don’t let me out, then I will be like this too,” said Mrs. Sala. He was afraid that they would keep him for a long time, he said, “I will come back as an animal, not a man.”

On Jan. 8, Mrs. Sala was on the plane home, and soon after, Italy released Mr. Abedini. Mrs. Sala was release partly with Elon Musk’s support, two Iranian officials said. “I played a small part,” Mr. Musk later posted on X.

Ms. Sala said she is eager to return to her job.

“I’m rushing to get back to being a journalist,” he said. “Telling someone else’s story.”

Its problems have returned in a big way, especially for journalists who want to go to Iran.

“Obviously, I’m not going back to Iran,” said Ms. Pray. “At least as long as there is an Islamic Republic.”

Farnaz Fasihi contributed reports from New York.