Vatican City historical timeline

Origins

The Vatican hill was outside the walls of ancient Rome, used for a circus and a cemetery. Tradition holds that Peter was executed there under Nero and buried on the site, and in about 326 Emperor Constantine built a basilica over the grave. The bishops of Rome accumulated land and then temporal power, and by the eighth century the Papal States governed a band of central Italy that they would hold for more than a thousand years.

Turning points

The papacy moved to Avignon for most of the fourteenth century and returned to find Rome half-ruined. The rebuilding that followed is why the place looks as it does: the present St Peter’s was begun in 1506 and worked on by Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo and finally Bernini, and Michelangelo painted the Sistine ceiling between 1508 and 1512. Italian unification then took the Papal States: Rome fell in 1870, and the pope refused to recognise it, declaring himself a prisoner in the Vatican for the next fifty-nine years. The Lateran Treaty of 1929 settled the question by creating a sovereign state of about forty-four hectares. The Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965 rewrote the Church’s relationship with the modern world, including the move from Latin to vernacular liturgy. In 2013 Benedict XVI resigned, the first pope to do so in almost six centuries.

Influential people

Peter, and Emperor Constantine, who built over his grave. Julius II, who commissioned both the new basilica and the Sistine ceiling and bullied Michelangelo into finishing it. Bernini, whose colonnade encloses the square like a pair of arms. John XXIII, who called the Second Vatican Council. And John Paul II, whose Polish origins and 1979 visit home are widely credited with weakening communist authority in eastern Europe.

Cultural evolution

This is the smallest sovereign state in the world by both area and population — a few hundred residents, and citizenship tied to office rather than birth. The Swiss Guard, in uniforms of a design attributed to the Renaissance, has protected the pope since 1506. The Apostolic Library and Archives hold material going back twelve centuries. Latin remains an official language. And the conclave that elects a pope still signals its result with smoke from a stove, which is an oddly effective piece of communication design.

Present-day significance

The Vatican Museums receive several million visitors a year, which makes a state of forty-four hectares one of the most visited places on earth, and the Sistine Chapel is the reason most of them come. Beyond the walls, a set of extraterritorial properties across Rome — including the basilicas of St John Lateran and Santa Maria Maggiore — also belong to the Holy See. The 2025 Jubilee year brought pilgrim numbers well above the usual.