Vatican City

The Vatican is what is left of something once very much larger, and its history is the story of the papacy's slow exchange of territorial power for a different kind.

In antiquity the Vatican was not part of Rome proper but a low, unhealthy district across the Tiber, notable chiefly for a circus begun by Caligula and completed by Nero, where Christians were among those executed after the fire of AD 64. Christian tradition holds that the Apostle Peter was martyred there and buried in a necropolis on the adjacent slope, and by the early fourth century Constantine had built a basilica over the spot, an enormous undertaking that required cutting into the hill and burying the cemetery beneath it. That basilica stood for over a thousand years before it was replaced, from 1506, by the present St Peter's, a project that consumed the working lives of Bramante, Michelangelo, Maderno, and Bernini across more than a century, and whose financing through the sale of indulgences was among the immediate provocations of the Reformation.

From the eighth century the popes ruled a substantial temporal state across central Italy, at times reaching from Rome to Ravenna, governed as an ordinary monarchy with an army, taxes, and prisons. That double role, spiritual head and territorial sovereign, shaped European politics for a millennium and was also the object of persistent criticism from within the Church.

Italian unification ended it. The Papal States were progressively absorbed, and in September 1870, with French troops withdrawn to fight Prussia, Italian forces took Rome itself. Pius the Ninth refused to accept the loss, declined the compensation Italy offered, and withdrew into the Vatican, declaring himself a prisoner; he and his three successors did not leave its grounds. The impasse, known as the Roman Question, lasted fifty-nine years.

It was settled in 1929 by the Lateran Treaty between the Holy See and Mussolini's government, which recognised Italian sovereignty over Rome, compensated the papacy financially, and created the Vatican City State as a sovereign territory of about 44 hectares, expressly to guarantee the pope's independence from any government. The state that exists today is therefore only a century old, though the institution it serves is very much older, and the distinction matters legally: the Holy See, not Vatican City, is the entity that conducts diplomacy, signs treaties, and holds permanent observer status at the United Nations.

During the Second World War the Vatican maintained formal neutrality. Pius the Twelfth's conduct in that period, whether his refusal to condemn the extermination of European Jews explicitly was a prudent effort to protect those the Church was sheltering or a moral failure, remains one of the genuinely unsettled arguments of twentieth-century history, and the opening of the relevant archives in 2020 has not closed it.

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries brought the Second Vatican Council of 1962 to 1965, which reformed the liturgy and the Church's relationship to other faiths and to the modern world; the long pontificate of John Paul the Second, whose role in the collapse of communism in Poland is widely acknowledged; the resignation of Benedict the Sixteenth in 2013, the first in nearly six centuries; and the pontificate of Francis, the first from the Americas, who emphasised poverty, migration, and the environment and pressed reform of the Curia and of the Vatican's finances. Francis died in April 2025. The conclave that followed elected Robert Prevost, an American who took the name Leo the Fourteenth, in May 2025, the first pope from the United States.

The gravest sustained crisis of the modern Church has been the revelation, from the 1990s onward and across many countries, of widespread sexual abuse of children by clergy and of its concealment by bishops. Successive popes have issued apologies, met victims, established reporting procedures, abolished the pontifical secret for such cases, and laicised offenders including senior figures; survivors' organisations and several national inquiries hold that accountability for those who covered up has remained substantially weaker than for those who offended.

St Peter's Basilica is built over a site that Catholic tradition holds to be the burial place of the Apostle Peter, regarded as the first pope, martyred in Rome in the first century, and excavations beneath the basilica have uncovered an ancient necropolis and bones that the Church has identified as his. Many scholars accept that an early shrine marked a tomb venerated as Peter's, but the certain identification of the remains is debated, and the claim rests on a blend of tradition, archaeology, and faith rather than conclusive proof.

Vatican City is a walled enclave of about 44 hectares entirely surrounded by Rome, on a low rise on the west bank of the Tiber known since antiquity as the Vatican Hill. It is the smallest sovereign state in the world by both area and population, and one can walk across it in a few minutes. More than half of it is garden, laid out from the sixteenth century and maintained ever since, which gives the state a quiet green interior quite unlike the crowds in the square.

Its buildings are extraordinarily concentrated. St Peter's Basilica, with Michelangelo's dome and his Pieta, and Bernini's colonnade sweeping around the square; the Apostolic Palace, holding the Raphael Rooms and the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo painted the ceiling between 1508 and 1512 and the Last Judgment a quarter-century later, and where conclaves elect popes; and the Vatican Museums, whose galleries run for kilometres and hold one of the largest art collections on Earth. The Vatican Apostolic Archive and Library preserve documents across a thousand years. Beyond the walls, a number of buildings in Rome and the papal residence at Castel Gandolfo hold extraterritorial status under the Lateran Treaty.

Vatican City is an absolute elective monarchy, and it is the only one left in Europe. The pope holds full legislative, executive, and judicial power, delegating administration to a governorate under a president and the Church's wider government to the Roman Curia, headed by the Cardinal Secretary of State. There is no electorate in the ordinary sense: the sovereign is chosen for life by the College of Cardinals in conclave, sealed in the Sistine Chapel and voting until one candidate reaches a two-thirds majority, the results of each ballot signalled by the colour of smoke from a chimney. Cardinals over eighty may not vote.

Two features distinguish the Vatican from every other state. Its citizenship, held by roughly 800 people, is not acquired by birth or ancestry but granted for the duration of a person's office and lost when that office ends, so it functions as a job condition rather than a nationality; nobody is stateless as a result, since everyone retains their original citizenship. And its diplomatic personality belongs to the Holy See, the government of the Church, rather than to the territory: the Holy See maintains relations with the great majority of states, has permanent observer status at the United Nations, and signs treaties, while Vatican City is simply the territory that guarantees its independence.

The state's security is provided by the Pontifical Swiss Guard, recruited from Catholic Swiss men, in service since 1506 and still wearing a Renaissance-derived uniform, alongside a civil Gendarmerie. Vatican finances rest on museum admissions, donations known as Peter's Pence, publishing, and investment income, and have been the subject of sustained reform efforts and of prosecutions in the Vatican's own courts.

The Vatican has no agriculture, no industry, and no natural resources, and it imports everything including its water and electricity. Its income comes from the museums, which receive millions of visitors a year, from the sale of stamps, coins, and publications, from Peter's Pence donations gathered in parishes worldwide, and from the returns on property and investments, some of it held through the Institute for the Works of Religion, the body commonly called the Vatican Bank, which has been the subject of repeated scandal and of successive reform programmes intended to bring it into line with international anti-money-laundering standards.

Its resident population of roughly 800 is unlike any other: predominantly male, predominantly clergy, with no children born there in the ordinary course, and a workforce of several thousand lay employees who live in Rome and commute in. Latin remains the official language of the Church's documents, while Italian is the working language of the state and the Curia. The Vatican operates its own post office, pharmacy, supermarket, railway station with the shortest national rail network in the world, radio station, and observatory, and issues its own euro coins under agreement with the European Union.

The flag of Vatican City is square, divided vertically into yellow and white halves, with the emblem of the papacy, the crossed keys of Saint Peter beneath the papal tiara, on the white side. The gold and silver of the two halves recall the keys themselves, said to be the keys to the kingdom of heaven entrusted to Peter, symbolising the spiritual authority of the pope. As one of only two square national flags in the world, and the emblem of a theocratic state, it is among the most distinctive of all national flags.

Religion is not merely present in Vatican City but is its entire reason for being: the state exists to serve the Roman Catholic Church and its leadership. The Pope, as Bishop of Rome, is both the head of state and the spiritual leader of the world's Catholics, and the Vatican is the seat of the Holy See, the central government of the Church. Its life revolves around the liturgy, the great ceremonies in St Peter's, the work of the various offices of Church administration, and the stream of pilgrims who come from across the world.

Vatican City has no distinct national cuisine of its own; the food eaten by the clergy, officials, Swiss Guards, and residents is essentially Roman and Italian, drawn from the surrounding city. Meals follow the traditions of central Italy, with pasta, regional Roman dishes, and the produce of the Italian markets. There are dining facilities and a famous supermarket and pharmacy serving the small community within the walls. The Vatican's culinary character, then, is simply that of Rome, the city that completely surrounds this unique ecclesiastical state.

Vatican City has no agriculture in any meaningful sense, given its minuscule size and wholly urban, monumental character, though its extensive gardens include ornamental plantings and historically some cultivation. It produces no food and relies entirely on Italy for its supplies. The state has no conventional economy of farming or industry; it sustains itself instead through the donations of the faithful around the world, the revenues of its museums, which draw millions of visitors, the sale of stamps, coins, and publications, and the management of the Holy See's investments.

Vatican City has a population of roughly 800, the smallest of any country in the world, and it is unlike any other national population. Its residents are overwhelmingly clergy, cardinals and officials of the Curia, members of the Swiss Guard, and the small staff who serve the state. There are almost no women, effectively no children, and no births in the ordinary course. Citizenship is granted for the duration of a person's office and lapses when that office ends, so nobody is born a Vatican citizen and nobody remains one after leaving; because every citizen retains their original nationality alongside it, the arrangement creates no stateless people.

Several thousand more lay employees, the workers who run the museums, the gardens, the printing press, and the shops, live in Rome and come in each day, so the daytime population is many times the resident one. Latin remains the language of the Church's formal documents and Italian is the working language of daily business, with the Swiss Guard's own commands given in German.