Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo (known as Pippa Bacca) (December 9 1974 — March 31 2008) was an Italian artist who, together with a fellow artist, was hitch-hiking from Milan to the Middle-East to promote world peace and trust in other people, symbolically wearing a wedding dress during her trek. Arriving in Gebze on March 31 2008, she went missing, and her sister flew to Turkey to locate her. Her raped body was discovered in the same city, a tourist's attraction due to the presence of the possible gravesite of Hannibal. On April 11 2008 she was formally identified by her sibling, and taken to Istanbul for an autopsy. The police arrested a man who had placed his SIM card into Bacca's mobile phone and he later led them to Bacca's body. The artists, wearing white wedding dresses, then travelled through Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Bulgaria, and arrived in Turkey on March 20 2008. They had planned to hitch-hike to Syria and then Lebanon by March 31, arriving in Israel and Palestinian territories by mid-April, their final destination being Jerusalem.
On her sisters hitch-hiking plans, and in light of the discovery of her body, her sibling Maria states to Italian news agency ANSA that "Her travels were for an artistic performance and to give a message of peace and of trust, but not everyone deserves trust... We weren’t particularly worried because she had been hitchhiking for a lot of time, and thus was capable of avoiding risky situations... She was a determined person when it had to do with working for art." Her body, described as "naked and decomposing" by All Headline News, was found in bushes in the city of Gebze. A man who led the police to her body, identified as Murat KarataÅŸ by AHN,
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