The world’s smallest sovereign state (a mere 0.44 sq km), the Vatican sits atop the low-lying Vatican hill just a few hundred metres west of the River Tiber. Centred on the domed bulk of St Peter’s Basilica and Piazza San Pietro, it is the capital of the Catholic world, a spiritual superpower whose law is gospel to the world’s one billion Catholics. On a more temporal level, it’s one of Rome’s most visited areas and you’ll almost certainly have to queue to get into St Peter’s Basilica and the Vatican Museums.Established under the terms of the 1929 Lateran Treaty, the State of the Vatican City is the modern vestige of the Papal States. For more than a thousand years, the Papal States encompassed Rome and much of central Italy, but when Italy was unified in 1861 and Rome fell to Italian troops in 1870, Pope Pius IX was forced to give up the last of his territorial possessions. Relations between Italy and the landless papacy remained strained until Mussolini and Pope Pius XI agreed to form the Vatican State in 1929.
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