Popes used to control vast areas of Italy – the so-called “papal states”. But when the unification of Italy was finally completed after the capture of Rome in 1870, only about 120 acres of central Rome were left in papal possession. Popes railed against the Italian state until the Lateran Pacts were signed with Benito Mussolini in 1929, when each side recognised the other and the theocratic Vatican City was created.
With a population of 764, it’s the smallest sovereign state in the world. But its reach is global, guiding the lives of more than a billion Catholics. “The Vatican is one of a kind,” Yvonnick Denoël writes in this dense study, “because of its hybrid status: it is a micro-state and, at the same time, a worldwide spiritual authority.”
