After Iran elected a more moderate president last year, Cecilia Sala, an Italian journalist, thought something may have changed in the country, which she had been covering from afar.
For two years, Iran had rejected her application for a journalist visa, but it granted her one after the election. Colleagues and friends told her Iran’s new government seemed more open to foreign reporters as it sought to repair relations with Europe.
Ms. Sala, 29, had not traveled to Iran since 2021, before an uprising led by women and girls demanded an end to clerical rule. So she took a plane to Tehran, the capital.
“I wanted to see with my eyes what had changed,” she said in an interview recently in Rome.
Instead, she got firsthand experience of what had not changed.
On Dec. 19, as she was preparing an episode of an Italian podcast that she hosts every day, two agents from the intelligence wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps came to her hotel room in Tehran. When she tried to grab her phone, she said, one of them threw it to the other side of the room.
They blindfolded her, Ms. Sala said, and took her to the notorious Evin prison, where most of Iran’s political prisoners are held and some are tortured.
At one point, when she asked what she was accused of, she was told, she said, that she had committed “many illegal actions in many places.”
Iran has used the detention of foreign and dual citizens as a cornerstone of its foreign policy for nearly five decades, since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The detainees — journalists, businesspeople, aid workers, diplomats, tourists — are effectively hostages whom Tehran leverages with other countries to swap prisoners and free frozen funds.
Ms. Sala feared from the start that she had been taken hostage for a swap.
She said she had read that Italy had arrested an Iranian engineer three days earlier at the request of the United States. The engineer, Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, was wanted for his role in procuring drone technology for Iran that was used in an attack that killed three American soldiers in Jordan.
“I was trapped in a game much bigger than I was,” she said.
Ms. Sala said she worried that if the United States insisted on extraditing Mr. Abedini, she might linger in prison for years, her release contingent on the decision of the incoming American president, Donald J. Trump.
At Evin, the guards gave Ms. Sala a prison uniform, she said — a gray tracksuit, a blue shirt and pants, a blue hijab and a long covering known as a chador. They seized her glasses, without which she is all but blind.
Her cell had two blankets and no mattress or pillow. The light was constantly on, she said, and she could not sleep.
She was blindfolded during hours of nearly daily interrogations in which she sat facing a wall, she said.
Her interrogator spoke flawless English, she said, and signaled that he knew Italy well by asking whether she preferred Roman or Neapolitan pizza crust.
She was permitted to speak at times with her parents and boyfriend back in Italy, she said, and when her mother told reporters there about her daughter’s conditions in prison, the interrogator told Ms. Sala that because of those remarks, Iran would detain her for much longer.
“Their game is to give you hope, and then use your hope to break you,” Ms. Sala said.
Through a narrow opening in her cell door, she said she heard sounds of crying, vomiting, footsteps and banging that sounded as if someone was running and hitting his or her head against the door.
“I thought if they don’t take me out, I am going to also end up like this,” Ms. Sala said. She feared that if they kept her for long, she said, “I would come back an animal, not a person.”
On Jan. 8, Ms. Sala was on a plane home, and shortly after, Italy freed Mr. Abedini. Ms. Sala was released in part with the assistance of Elon Musk, two Iranian officials said. “I played a small role,” Mr. Musk later wrote on X.
Ms. Sala said she was eager to return to her work.
“I am in a rush to go back to being a journalist,” she said. “To tell someone else’s story.”
Her ordeal has reverberated widely, particularly for journalists wanting to travel to Iran.
“Obviously, I am not going back to Iran,” Ms. Sala said. “At least as long as there is the Islamic Republic.”