“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.