Vatican City

• 1. Introduction

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  Vatican City sits on a marshy patch of ground that the ancient Romans considered cursed. Long before popes built their palaces here, the area was known as ominous territory, prone to floods, and home to notoriously bad wine. The poet Martial, writing in the first century AD, complained about that wine specifically. Tacitus recorded that soldiers camped there in AD69 fell sick from the unhealthy ground and the river close by. Yet today, on those same 43.9 hectares, stands the smallest sovereign state in the world, home to roughly 882 people, and the administrative center of a faith with about 1.329 billion baptized members.

  How did a flood-prone hillside outside Rome become its own country? Why does the pope hold the title of the only absolute monarch in Europe? And what exactly is the difference between Vatican City and the Holy See, two names so often used interchangeably that even seasoned observers conflate them? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. From Cursed Ground to Holy Hill

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  Agrippina the Elder drained the waterlogged Vatican fields in the early first century AD, transforming swampy terrain into gardens. Her son, the emperor Caligula, built a circus for charioteers there in AD40. That circus was later completed by Nero and called the Circus Gaii et Neronis, and it became the site where tradition holds that Saint Peter was crucified upside-down after the Great Fire of Rome in AD64.

  A single stone relic survives from that circus: the Vatican obelisk now standing in St Peter's Square. Caligula had it transported from Heliopolis in Roman Egypt. It originally stood at the center of the circus's central median, and in 1586 Pope Sixtus V had it moved to its present position, using a method devised by the Italian architect Domenico Fontana.

  Across the road from the circus lay a cemetery of funeral monuments, mausoleums, and altars to pagan gods of many traditions. A shrine to the Phrygian goddess Cybele and her partner Attis remained active even after an early Christian basilica rose nearby. The Constantinian basilica was built in 326 over what was believed to be the tomb of Saint Peter, buried in that cemetery. Remains of the ancient necropolis were systematically excavated from 1939 to 1941 on the order of Pope Pius XII, uncovering layers of religious history beneath the foundations of the modern state.

  The area grew more populated as activity at the basilica increased. A palace appeared nearby as early as the 5th century, during the pontificate of Pope Symmachus, who reigned from 498 to 514. Following a raid on the old basilica by Muslim forces in 846, Pope Leo IV built the Leonine Wall to protect the area, a fortification whose walls would eventually define the territory of a future country.

• 3. A Thousand Years of Papal Power

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  For more than a thousand years, popes governed not just a church but a substantial stretch of Central Italy known as the Papal States. This secular role ended in the mid-19th century when the newly unified Kingdom of Italy seized that territory. Yet for most of those centuries, the popes did not even live at Vatican City. The Lateran Palace, on the opposite side of Rome, served as their habitual residence for roughly a thousand years.

  From 1309 to 1377, the popes resided in Avignon, France, in what historians call the Avignon Papacy. When they returned to Rome, they chose the Vatican as their home. They later moved to the Quirinal Palace in 1583, after construction there was completed under Pope Paul V.

  The seizure of Rome by Italian forces in 1870 upended this arrangement entirely. Pope Pius IX, who reigned from 1846 to 1878 and was the last ruler of the Papal States, became known as a "prisoner in the Vatican." The popes refused to acknowledge the Italian king's right to govern Rome and declined to leave the Vatican compound. In 1871, the Italian government confiscated the Quirinal Palace and turned it into a royal residence. The popes' temporal authority had been stripped away, and their focus shifted inward, toward spiritual governance. The unresolved tension between the papacy and the Italian state became known as the "Roman Question," and it lingered for nearly six decades.

• 4. The Treaty That Made a Country

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  On the 11th of February 1929, two men signed their names to a document at the Lateran Palace and created a country. On one side sat Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, signing on behalf of King Victor Emmanuel III. On the other was Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Gasparri, representing Pope Pius XI. The Lateran Treaty was ratified and took effect on the 7th of June 1929.

  The treaty established Vatican City as an independent state and reaffirmed the special status of Catholic Christianity in Italy. Crucially, the treaty also specified that Vatican City was a fresh creation, not a surviving remnant of the Papal States that had stretched across Central Italy from 756 to 1870. The name itself came directly from that agreement; the Lateran Treaty was the first document to use the name "Vatican City," derived from Vatican Hill, which took its name in turn from an ancient Etruscan settlement called Vatica or Vaticum.

  Mussolini's involvement had a lasting physical consequence. The grand Via della Conciliazione, the broad avenue that now runs from the Tiber River to St Peter's Square, was constructed on his orders after the treaty's conclusion. The borders of the new state were shaped partly by existing walls and partly by the loop of buildings that already more or less enclosed the territory. For a small portion of the frontier, a modern wall was built specifically for the occasion.

  The treaty also extended certain privileges beyond Vatican City's walls. Properties of the Holy See scattered across Rome and Italy, including the Papal Palace of Castel Gandolfo and the major basilicas, were granted extraterritorial status similar to that of foreign embassies.

• 5. Vatican City and the Holy See

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  The most common misunderstanding about Vatican City is treating it as identical to the Holy See. They are distinct entities with different histories and different legal personalities. The Holy See has existed continuously as a juridical entity since Roman Imperial times. It retained international recognition even during the period from 1870 to 1929, when it held no territory at all. Vatican City State, by contrast, was created in 1929 specifically to give the Holy See a physical home and temporal independence.

  The Holy See is the principal governing body of the Catholic Church and holds the powers of diplomacy, spiritual governance, and international relations. Vatican City is the small sovereign territory that houses it. One analogy the source offers: the state can be understood as a significant but not essential instrument of the Holy See.

  This distinction has practical consequences. Vatican City is not a member of the United Nations, but the Holy See holds permanent observer status at the UN General Assembly, with all the rights of a full member except a vote. The Holy See gained that observer status in 1968. In international organizations whose functions relate to the city-state as a geographical entity, Vatican City itself holds memberships, including in Interpol and the International Telecommunication Union. For the US$20,000 contributed to the Central Emergency Response Fund between 2006 and 2022, that contribution came through the Holy See's observer engagement with UN specialized agencies.

  The government of Vatican City has a unique structure built around the pope's absolute authority. The Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State, a body of cardinals appointed by the pope for five-year periods, manages legislative functions in the pope's name. Executive power rests with the president of that commission. As of the 1st of March 2025, Pope Francis appointed the Italian sister Raffaella Petrini to that presidency. She was reconfirmed in the role by Pope Leo XIV on the 9th of May 2025, the day after Leo XIV was elected.

• 6. Art, Science, and the Swiss Guard

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  St Peter's Basilica was designed by a succession of architects that reads like a roster of Renaissance masters: Bramante, Michelangelo, Giacomo della Porta, Carlo Maderno, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The Sistine Chapel holds frescos by Perugino, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Sandro Botticelli, alongside Michelangelo's ceiling and Last Judgment. The interiors of the Vatican were decorated by Raphael and Fra Angelico.

  Less well known is the Vatican's scientific activity. Pope Pius XI founded the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1936, located in the Casina Pio IV. Its members have included Ernest Rutherford, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureates Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, the theoretical physicist Edward Witten, and the geneticist Francis Collins. The Vatican Observatory traces its origins to the 16th century; early telescopes in the Vatican Gardens contributed to the Carte du Ciel sky survey, but light pollution in the 1930s rendered those instruments useless for research. Pope Pius XI moved the observatory to the Vatican's extraterritorial Palace of Castel Gandolfo, and it now operates in partnership with the University of Arizona through the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope in Arizona.

  Security at the smallest state falls to an institution founded on the 22nd of January 1506, when Pope Julius II established the Pontifical Swiss Guard as his personal bodyguard. It has never stopped fulfilling that function. In 2005, the Guard had 134 members. Every recruit must be a Catholic, unmarried Swiss male who has completed basic training with the Swiss Armed Forces, holds a certificate of good conduct, is between 19 and 30 years old, and stands at least 174 centimeters tall. Guards are equipped with small arms and the traditional halberd, and they take their oath of loyalty individually, each in his own language: German, French, Italian, or Romansh.

• 7. Money, Sovereignty, and Unusual Records

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  Vatican City's citizenship law follows a principle found almost nowhere else: jus officii, meaning citizenship is granted by appointment to a specific role in service of the Holy See. It does not pass by birth within the territory or by descent from a citizen. When the appointment ends, citizenship typically ends with it. Anyone who loses Vatican citizenship without holding another nationality automatically becomes an Italian citizen, under a provision of the Lateran Treaty.

  The Vatican has used the euro as its currency since January 1999, under a special agreement with the European Union. Euro coins and notes entered circulation on the 1st of January 2002. Vatican euro coins are strictly limited in quantity by treaty, with more coins permitted in a year that sees a new papacy. Collectors prize them for their rarity. The Vatican Bank, formally the Institute for Works of Religion, runs multilingual ATMs with instructions available in Latin, possibly the only ATMs in the world to offer that option.

  The state's finances have attracted scrutiny. In 2012, the US Department of State's International Narcotics Control Strategy Report listed Vatican City among countries of concern for money-laundering for the first time. In February 2014, following charges against two senior clerics including a monsignor, the Vatican established a secretariat for the economy headed by Cardinal George Pell. Pope Francis appointed an auditor-general with authority to audit any agency at any time and engaged a US financial services company to review the Vatican's 19,000 accounts.

  Statistical comparisons with other countries produce some striking anomalies. Because most roles conferring citizenship are reserved for men, the Vatican's gender ratio among citizens tilts heavily male. Petty theft from tourists produces a high per-capita crime rate. Sacramental use of wine results in the city-state leading the world in per-capita wine consumption. One jocular measure sometimes cited is "popes per square kilometer," a figure greater than two given that Vatican City covers less than half a square kilometer. Its record high temperature, 40.8 degrees Celsius, was set on the 28th of June 2022.