The Vatican

The ambiguity of the word "Vatican" is not a journalistic detail: it covers a precise legal and theological distinction, which the press confuses almost systematically. Three realities deserve to be clearly separated before any other explanation.

Vatican Hill, a place before being a State

The Vatican is first of all a geographical place: a low hill on the right bank of the Tiber, facing the ancient Campus Martius, on which St. Peter's Basilica and its dependencies now stand. This place has existed since Roman antiquity, long before any pontifical sovereignty was exercised there. One may speak of the "Vatican" of the year 60 AD, at the time when Nero owned a circus there, even though no State and no papacy yet existed under that name.^[15]

The State of Vatican City, the territorial sovereignty of 1929

The Vatican has also referred, since 11 February 1929, to a sovereign State in the sense of international law: the State of Vatican City (Stato della Città del Vaticano), created by the Lateran Treaty signed by Pius XI and Benito Mussolini. This State, the smallest in the world recognised as such, covers 44 hectares and counts several hundred residents; it has its own laws, its own government, its own courts and its own police force. Its complete history — negotiations, content of the Treaty, organs of government — is developed in the dedicated article.

The Holy See, a subject of international law predating the State

The Vatican serves finally, by metonymy, to designate the Holy See (Sancta Sedes) — that is, the authority of the pope as supreme head of the Catholic Church, with his Roman Curia. The Holy See is a subject of international law in its own right, distinct from the Vatican State: it already existed, and maintained diplomatic relations with the European powers, well before 1929, including during the period 1870-1929 when the pope held no sovereign territory. It is the Holy See, and not the State of Vatican City, which signs concordats, maintains diplomatic relations with 184 states (most recently the Sultanate of Oman, in February 2023)^[16] and sits as a permanent observer at the UN.^[17] The details of this distinct legal personality are treated in the article devoted to the Holy See.

"The Vatican" in everyday language

In ordinary and media usage, "the Vatican" serves finally as a shorthand for the State, the Holy See, the Roman Curia or even the person of the pope — much as people say "the White House" for the American executive or "the Élysée" for the French presidency. This confusion is convenient in ordinary conversation, but it misleads the reader who wants to understand precisely who decides what: a doctrinal decree belongs to the Holy See and its dicasteries, whereas a regulation on car traffic within the walls belongs to the State of Vatican City.

A summary table will fix these distinctions before approaching the history and heritage of the place.

Why this name: the hill of the vaticinia

The origin of the Latin name Vaticanus has remained debated since antiquity itself. The grammarian Varro (1st century BC) linked it to a god Vaticanus or Vagitanus, said to preside over the first wailing (vagitus) of newborns; the grammarian Aulus Gellius, later, derives it from vaticinium, prophecy obtained by the flight of birds or the examination of the entrails of sacrificed victims — an art of divination inherited from the Etruscans, who are thought to have practised their rites on this hill even before the foundation of Rome.^[18] A third hypothesis, more prosaic, derives the name from an Etruscan settlement called Vatica or Vaticum, of which no archaeological trace has however been found.^[19] Whatever the exact etymology, ancient tradition already associated this place with the idea of omen and inspired speech — a striking coincidence for the site that would become, centuries later, the seat of the magisterium of the Church.

The Ager Vaticanus, an unhealthy plain at the foot of the hill

Under the Roman Republic, the Ager Vaticanus — the alluvial plain on the right bank of the Tiber, outside the city walls — had a bad reputation: marshy ground, considered unhealthy, frequented mostly by the poorest.^[20] At the end of the 1st century BC, however, great patrician families began to build horti there, luxurious country residences. One of these estates, the Horti Agrippinae, belonged to Agrippina the Elder and then passed to her son Caligula (emperor from 37 to 41), a lover of chariot racing, who had a private circus built there, completed under his successor Claudius.^[21]

Nero, heir to this estate and this circus, opened it to the public to be acclaimed as a charioteer, and also used the grounds to rehouse Romans left homeless by the great fire of 64. It is in this same circus, in 65, that Nero had Christians accused of burning the city executed en masse — a persecution reported by the Latin historian Tacitus in his Annals.^[22] The circus gradually fell into disuse in the mid-2nd century; the land was then divided into plots for a necropolis, where pagan tombs stood side by side with, soon, Christian burials.^[23]

The martyrdom of the apostle Peter, 64-67

It is in this precise setting — Nero's circus and its immediate surroundings — that the oldest Christian tradition places the martyrdom of the apostle Peter, probably during the persecution following the fire of 64 or in the years after, up to the death of Nero in 68. The apostle, according to a tradition attested as early as the 2nd century by authors such as Clement of Rome and Irenaeus of Lyons, is said to have been crucified upside down — a torment he is said to have requested himself, deeming himself unworthy of dying in the same manner as Christ. His body, according to this same tradition, was buried in the immediate vicinity, in the necropolis adjoining the circus, on the slope of Vatican Hill.^[24]

"You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." — Gospel according to Saint Matthew, 16:18

This word of Christ to Simon Peter, reported by the evangelist Matthew, is the very one that runs today, in giant letters, beneath the dome of the basilica built more than fifteen centuries later exactly above the traditional tomb of the apostle — an inscription more than two metres high per letter, nearly two hundred metres long, considered by some Latinists to be the largest visible Latin inscription in the world.^[25]

The necropolis rediscovered: the excavations of Pius XII

For centuries, the exact location of Peter's tomb remained known through tradition and continuous veneration, but unverified archaeologically. In 1939, a few days after his election, Pope Pius XII authorised a campaign of archaeological excavations beneath the basilica, on the occasion of works to fit out the crypt for the burial of his predecessor Pius XI. Under the direction of Msgr Ludwig Kaas, the team uncovered, between 1939 and 1949, a whole pagan and Christian necropolis of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, buried beneath the foundations of the Constantinian basilica.^[26]

On 23 December 1950, in a famous radio message, Pius XII announced to the world the results of the first decade of excavations, with deliberate scientific caution:

"At the side of the tomb, the remains of human bones have been found. However, it is impossible to prove with certainty that they belong to the body of the apostle." — Pius XII, 1950 Christmas radio message^[27]

From 1952 onwards, the epigraphist Margherita Guarducci resumed the study of the inscriptions found on the walls of a neighbouring wall, the "wall of graffiti". She deciphered there in particular the Greek expression Petros eni — "Peter is here" — and connected this graffiti with bones kept apart in a niche of the same wall, wrapped in a cloth of purple edged with gold, a sign of exceptional funerary treatment.^[28] On the basis of this work, Pope Paul VI announced in 1968 that the recovered relics had been identified as those of Saint Peter "in a manner that we can consider convincing" — without the Church imposing this conclusion as a dogma of faith. The archaeologist Antonio Ferrua, who had directed the initial excavations, later expressed reservations about this definitive identification, recalling the share of uncertainty inherent in any archaeological reconstruction of this kind.^[29] This caution is moreover consistent with the encyclopaedic method: the veneration of the place as Peter's tomb rests on an unbroken and coherent tradition since the 2nd century, corroborated but not strictly proven by 20th-century archaeology.

The first St. Peter's Basilica

Around 326, the emperor Constantine, converted to Christianity, had an immense five-nave basilica built on top of the necropolis, directly above the venerated tomb of Peter — a remarkable architectural choice, since it required levelling an entire flank of the hill and building on burial ground, when a more convenient site could have been chosen elsewhere in Rome.^[30] This deliberate choice signals, as early as the 4th century, the importance the Church already attached to this precise place: it was not a practical location sanctified after the fact, but a venerated tomb around which building went ahead, at the cost of considerable works. This old basilica remained, for more than a thousand years, the principal place of pilgrimage and imperial coronation in Western Christendom — it is there that Charlemagne was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day 800.

The sack of 846 and the birth of the Leonine City

In 846, Arab raiders from Sicily sailed up the Tiber and plundered the extra-mural basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul Outside the Walls, situated outside the ancient walls of the city and therefore defenceless — without however managing to penetrate Rome itself, protected by the Aurelian Walls.^[31] This sack lastingly traumatised the papacy: for the first time, the very tomb of the apostle had lain at the mercy of invaders.

Elected pope the following year, Leo IV (847-855) undertook, from 848 to 852, the construction of a three-kilometre circuit wall, which for the first time in its history encircled the whole of Vatican Hill and the basilica. To this end the pope mobilised labour from his estates, the local inhabitants, Saracen prisoners captured after the naval battle of Ostia in 849, and Frankish funding.^[32] This wall, remembered in history as the Leonine Wall, gave birth to what the chronicles now call the Leonine City (Civitas Leonina) — the first time the Vatican constituted a fortified space distinct from the rest of Rome, a prefiguration, nearly eleven centuries ahead of time, of the idea of a separate Vatican territory.^[33]

Rome without the popes: the papacy at Avignon

From 1309 to 1377, seven successive popes, all French, resided not in Rome but in Avignon, in France, following political pressure exerted by the Capetian monarchy on Pope Clement V. For nearly seven decades, the Vatican basilica, deprived of the continuous pontifical presence, deteriorated for lack of regular maintenance; the Lateran, the historic residence of the bishops of Rome, likewise suffered from this prolonged absence.^[34]

The return to Rome was largely obtained thanks to the insistence of Saint Catherine of Siena, the Dominican mystic who multiplied pressing letters to Pope Gregory XI to convince him to come back to the Eternal City.

"I tell you, father in Christ Jesus, come swiftly like a gentle lamb. [...] Respond to the Holy Spirit Who calls you. I tell you, Come, come, come, and do not wait for time, since time does not wait for you." — Saint Catherine of Siena, letter to Gregory XI, c. 1376^[35]

On 17 January 1377, Gregory XI did indeed return to Rome, despite the opposition of the King of France and of part of the Sacred College, putting an end to the Avignon papacy.^[36] This return, hailed by Saint Catherine as an act of fidelity to the Roman mission of the papacy, shortly preceded the death of the pope in 1378 and the opening of the Western Schism — but it fixed definitively, for the future, the Vatican as the natural seat of the successors of Peter rather than the Lateran, until then the traditional residence of the popes.

A basilica threatening ruin

At the turn of the 16th century, the old Constantinian basilica, nearly twelve hundred years old, threatened ruin: the walls leaned, the roof timbers cracked. Pope Nicholas V (1447-1455) already envisaged a reconstruction, but it was Julius II (1503-1513) who took the definitive decision to raze the ancient building in order to erect, in its place, the largest church in Christendom.

The laying of the foundation stone and the successive architects

On 18 April 1506, Julius II himself laid the foundation stone of the new basilica, to a Greek-cross plan drawn by the architect Donato Bramante.^[37] The colossal building works extended over one hundred and twenty years and saw several of the greatest architects of the Renaissance and early Baroque succeed one another, each bending the initial project.

After the death of Sangallo the Younger, on 3 August 1546, Pope Paul III entrusted the direction of the works, on 1 January 1547, to Michelangelo, then seventy-two years old. According to the testimony of his biographer Vasari, Michelangelo judged his predecessor's plans unsatisfactory and took the project back up in the spirit of Bramante's centralised plan, while designing the great dome which today dominates the whole of Rome.^[38] Michelangelo died in 1564 without seeing the dome completed; his successors, Giacomo della Porta and Domenico Fontana, brought it to completion in accordance with his plans. It was finally Carlo Maderno who, between 1602 and 1629, lengthened the nave to return to a Latin-cross plan and designed the present facade, giving the basilica its definitive form.^[39]

The consecration by Urban VIII

On 18 November 1626, Pope Urban VIII solemnly consecrated the new basilica — one hundred and twenty years after the laying of the foundation stone by Julius II.^[40] St. Peter's Basilica remains today the largest church in Christendom by interior area, and the place where the principal pontifical liturgies are celebrated.

The Sistine Chapel

Built between 1477 and 1480 on the orders of Pope Sixtus IV, after whom it is named, the Sistine Chapel served from the outset as the private chapel of the popes and as the place of the conclave which elects each new pontiff.^[41] Between 1508 and 1512, Michelangelo frescoed the ceiling there, nine central scenes taken from Genesis — from the Creation of Adam to the Flood — surrounded by prophets and sibyls.^[42] Twenty-five years later, between 1536 and 1541, the same Michelangelo, then in his sixties, returned to paint on the altar wall the immense fresco of the Last Judgment, commissioned by Clement VII and completed under Paul III.^[43] It is beneath this ceiling that the conclave of cardinal electors still meets today to choose the successor of Peter — the most recent example being the election of Pope Leo XIV on 8 May 2025.^[44]

The Vatican Museums

The Vatican Museums trace their origin to a single work: the sculpted group of the Laocoön, discovered on 14 January 1506 in a vineyard near Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. Julius II, informed of the discovery, sent the architect Giuliano da Sangallo and the young Michelangelo to examine it on the spot, then acquired the sculpture and had it displayed in the Belvedere Courtyard of the small palace built under Innocent VIII.^[45] This initial collection of antique sculptures grew with successive pontificates until Popes Clement XIV (1769-1774) and then Pius VI (1775-1799) gave it a new institutional form by founding the Pio-Clementino Museum, open to the public in a spirit typical of the Enlightenment: to preserve, study and make known antiquities, no longer merely to accumulate them in a private cabinet.^[46] Today, the Vatican Museums as a whole — some fifty galleries in all — welcome nearly seven million visitors each year, making it the second most visited museum complex in the world after the Louvre.^[47]

The Vatican Apostolic Library

In 1451, the humanist pope Nicholas V undertook to build up, at the Vatican, a great public library intended to restore the intellectual radiance of Rome: he gathered some 350 Greek, Latin and Hebrew manuscripts inherited from his predecessors, to which were added his own acquisitions, including manuscripts from the recently fallen imperial library of Constantinople. By 1455, the collection already reached 1,200 volumes.^[48] It was however his successor Sixtus IV who gave this project a formal institutional existence, by the bull Ad decorem militantis Ecclesiae of 15 June 1475, appointing the first official librarian, the humanist Bartolomeo Platina.^[49] Today, the Vatican Apostolic Library holds some 80,000 manuscripts and over a million printed books, including some of the oldest known witnesses to the biblical text.

The Vatican Apostolic Archives

In 1612, Pope Paul V ordered the regrouping, in a single place in the Apostolic Palace, of all the pontifical archives hitherto scattered, and on 31 January 1612 appointed the first archivist, Baldassarre Ansidei.^[50] Long closed to any outside researcher, these archives — called for centuries the "Vatican Secret Archives", the word "secret" then simply meaning "private" and not "concealed" — were opened to historians by Pope Leo XIII at the end of the 19th century.^[51] On 22 October 2019, Pope Francis officially renamed the institution the Vatican Apostolic Archives, precisely to dispel the ambiguity of the word "secret" in modern languages:

"The term 'secret', in relation to the Vatican Archive, began to be misunderstood, to be coloured with ambiguous, even negative nuances [...]. The Church is not afraid of history, but, rather, she loves it." — Pope Francis, apostolic letter L'esperienza storica, 22 October 2019^[52]

The Vatican Gardens

In 1279, Pope Nicholas III moved his residence from the Lateran back to the Vatican and had part of the hill enclosed with walls to lay out an orchard, a lawn and a garden — the origin of the present Vatican Gardens.^[53] A lover of the medicinal virtues of plants, Nicholas III had one of Europe's first botanical gardens for therapeutic study cultivated there, with the help of his personal physician. Considerably enlarged and transformed during the Renaissance under the influence of architects such as Bramante and then Pirro Ligorio, these gardens today occupy 23 of the 44 hectares of the Vatican State — more than half of its total area — and have housed, since 1931, the palace of the Governorate which administers the State.

The complete diplomatic history of the creation of the State — the Pacelli-Barone negotiations, the content of the Treaty and the Concordat, the reception of the text — is the subject of the dedicated articles The Lateran Agreements (11 February 1929) and The Creation of the State of Vatican City (11 February 1929). Suffice it here to recall that this minuscule territory — 44 hectares, 3.2 kilometres of border with Italy, between 500 and 880 residents depending on the census method used as of 31 December 2024 — has constituted, since 1929, an elective absolute monarchy whose holder is the pope, governed for executive power by the Governorate, chaired since March 2025 by a religious sister, Raffaella Petrini, the first woman to hold this office.^[54]

The security of the State is ensured by two distinct corps: the Pontifical Swiss Guard, founded on 22 January 1506 by Julius II — the oldest military corps in the world still in uninterrupted activity, today about 134 men strong — and the Corps of Gendarmerie, a civil police force inherited from the corps founded by Pius VII in 1816, reorganised in 1970 by Paul VI when he suppressed the Noble Guard and the Palatine Guard of Honour, retaining only the Swiss Guard among the traditional armed corps.^[55]

📖 See the detailed article: The Creation of the State of Vatican City (11 February 1929) — organs of government, citizenship, Swiss Guard and Gendarmerie.

📖 See the detailed article: The Lateran Agreements (11 February 1929) — negotiations, content of the three documents, reception and 1984 revision.

Distinct from the territorial State, the central government of the Catholic Church likewise sits at the Vatican, under the direct authority of the pope. Several institutions overlap there, each the subject of a specific Ignispedia article in preparation, which the present article merely situates briefly.

The Holy See is the subject of international law constituted by the pope and the organs which assist him in the government of the universal Church — distinct, as seen above, from the State of Vatican City.

📖 See the detailed article: The Holy See

The Roman Curia is the whole of the dicasteries, tribunals and offices through which the pope exercises his pastoral and administrative government over the Catholic Church throughout the world.

📖 See the detailed article: The Roman Curia

The Secretariat of State is the organ closest to the pope within the Curia, charged with coordinating the action of the dicasteries and conducting the diplomacy of the Holy See with States.

📖 See the detailed article: The Secretariat of State

The College of Cardinals brings together the closest collaborators of the pope in Rome and throughout the world; assembled in conclave, it is this body which elects the new pontiff on the death or resignation of his predecessor — as was the case on 8 May 2025 for the election of Leo XIV.

📖 See the detailed article: The College of Cardinals

The press and media of the Holy See

The daily newspaper L'Osservatore Romano first appeared in Rome on 1 July 1861, a few months after the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, with the explicit aim of defending the Pontifical States against the Risorgimento movement.^[56] Bought directly by Pope Leo XIII in 1885, moved inside the walls of the Vatican in 1929 to shelter it from Fascist squads, it became during the Second World War one of the rare Italian newspapers to publish Allied communiqués, bringing its circulation to over 350,000 copies.^[57]

On 12 February 1931, two years after the foundation of the State, Pope Pius XI inaugurated, with the technical assistance of the physicist Guglielmo Marconi, the station of Vatican Radio. The first signal, sent in Morse code, transmitted the Latin words In nomine Domini, Amen; Marconi himself then announced the pope's message, who thus became the first pontiff in history to address the world by radio.^[58] These two historic media have since merged, with other organs, into the digital portal Vatican News, born of the reform of the communications of the Holy See launched in 2015.

Post, currency and symbols of the State

On 1 August 1929, the postal service of the Vatican State officially entered into operation, with equipment supplied by Italy; the Vatican joined the Universal Postal Union from that date and issued, on the same day, its first series of stamps, known as the "Conciliation" issue.^[59] On the monetary plane, the State first struck its own currency in Vatican lire, aligned with the Italian lira from 1929 to 2002; since the entry into force, on 1 January 2002, of a monetary convention signed with the European Union on 29 December 2000, the Vatican has used the euro as its official currency and strikes its own coins, although it is a member of neither the European Union nor the euro area in the institutional sense.^[60]

A UNESCO World Heritage property

In 1984, UNESCO listed the entire territory of the State of Vatican City on the World Heritage List — a unique case in the whole list, since it is the only listed property which coincides exactly with the entire territory of a sovereign State. UNESCO's notice stresses that this minuscule territory brings together "a unique collection of artistic and architectural masterpieces", centred on St. Peter's Basilica, "the largest religious church in the world", erected above the tomb of the apostle.^[61]

A world pilgrimage destination

The Vatican remains, nineteen centuries after Peter's martyrdom, one of the principal pilgrimage destinations of Christendom. The scale of this attendance manifested itself spectacularly during the Jubilee of the year 2025: more than 33.4 million pilgrims, from 185 countries, came to Rome, far exceeding the initial forecasts of the Holy See, which expected 31.7 million visitors.^[62] The Vatican Museums alone now welcome nearly seven million visitors each year, a flow which has recovered and surpassed its pre-2020 pandemic level.^[63]

St. Peter's Basilica has hosted not only pontifical liturgies: it was also the setting of the last two ecumenical councils in the history of the Catholic Church. The First Vatican Council, opened on 8 December 1869 and interrupted by the capture of Rome in September 1870, defined there in particular the dogma of pontifical infallibility; nearly a century later, the Second Vatican Council, assembled from 1962 to 1965, profoundly renewed there the theology, the liturgy and the relations of the Catholic Church with the contemporary world. These two councils, which took their very name from the place where they met, are each the subject of a detailed article.

📖 See the detailed article: First Vatican Council (1869-1870)

📖 See the detailed article: Second Vatican Council (1962-1965)

From the Catholic point of view, the disproportion between the minuscule size of the Vatican — less than half a square kilometre — and the worldwide influence it exercises over more than a billion Catholics is not a mere geopolitical paradox: it is the visible sign of a reality which faith has affirmed from the origins. The tomb rediscovered beneath the altar of the basilica, the words of Matthew 16:18 inscribed beneath the dome, and the continuous presence of a successor of Peter on this same place for nearly two thousand years, give the Vatican a significance which far overflows its status as a micro-State.

This link between the place and the mission lies at the heart of the Catholic theology of Petrine primacy: it is no accident of history that the seat of the universal magisterium of the Church stands precisely where the apostle chosen by Christ to be the "rock" of his Church gave his life. The hill once devoted to pagan omens (vaticinia) and to Nero's executions has become, through faith and twenty centuries of continuity, the place from which the successor of Peter confirms his brethren in the faith (cf. Luke 22:32) and exercises, as the Lateran Agreements themselves recall, his mission "free in a free land"^[64] — a minuscule territory in the service of a mission which itself knows no frontier.

• Read The Creation of the State of Vatican City (11 February 1929): institutions, citizenship, government of the Vatican State.
• Read The Lateran Agreements (11 February 1929): negotiations, content and diplomatic scope of the founding treaty.
• Read First Vatican Council (1869-1870): the first council held in St. Peter's Basilica.
• Read Second Vatican Council (1962-1965): the second ecumenical council held in St. Peter's Basilica.
• Read The Holy See, The Roman Curia, The Secretariat of State and The College of Cardinals: the central government of the Catholic Church.