Italy 2014 Day 08 – Monday 27 October

Traditional Latin Mass in St. Peter's Basilica
(Picture by Ashley Hebert)

The wake-up call came early today – 05:30, for 06:30 breakfast and 07:15 bus departure for the Vatican City, the temporal center of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.  The Vatican is kind of like Florence – where to start?  Well, here’s the gist:  Vatican City is a walled, independent city-state completely surrounded by the city of Rome.  It comprises an area of about 110 acres, with a population under a thousand, ruled by the Pope.  It’s located on the right side of the Tiber River, across the river from the Seven Hills of Ancient Rome, on the Vatican Hill and surrounding once-marshy fields abutting the Janiculum Hill.  This walled area is all that’s left of over a thousand years when the Popes were temporal as well as spiritual leaders in central Italy, much of which comprised the Papal States.  In 1861, all of Italy save Rome was united by the King of Sardinia into the modern Kingdom of Italy; the Popes lost all except the city itself.  Then, as a result of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, France withdrew its troops which had been protecting Rome’s independence, and the Popes lost Rome.  They withdrew within the walls of the Vatican, not to emerge for almost sixty years, until the 1929 Lateran Treaty between Pope Pius XI and Benito Mussolini secured the status of the Vatican as an independent state.  St. Peter’s Basilica, the most important of the four Major Basilicas of Rome, fronted by the great Square with the sweeping colonnades, is only a small part of the complex, which contains much more – residences for the functionaries of the Holy See, offices, chapels, museums, libraries, gardens – only a fraction of which were we able to see in our day there.