How do Vatican City and Italy coexist?

in

This is the script for my video posted on June 8, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

Vatican City is the smallest country in the world, with just half a square kilometer of land and under a thousand residents, and it’s the only country in the world that is fully surrounded by another country’s capital. Consequently, Vatican City and Italy share a really complex and fascinating history together, particularly when it comes to the way they engage with the rest of the world. So how do the Vatican and Italy coexist when it comes to geopolitics?

While the Roman Catholic Church has existed since the 1st century CE, the story of the Vatican and Italy really starts in 756 CE when Frankish king Pepin the Short, the father of Charlemagne, defeated the Lombards in central Italy. At the time, the Italian peninsula was fractured between the Lombards in the north and south and a few remaining pockets of the surviving Eastern Roman Empire. Pepin the Short was a Christian, and he willingly gave the pope much of the territory he took from the Lombards. This is commonly considered the beginning of the Papal States, which were the pope’s non-spiritual dominion.

Through the Papal States, the pope controlled all of central Italy and many other areas until the mid-19th century, with about 40000 square kilometers of territory and over 3m inhabitants at its peak. The pope served as far more than just a religious leader in this period. He was the absolute monarch of a powerful state the size of Switzerland with an army, tax collectors, prisons, and a navy, for over a thousand years. He also wielded incredible direct and indirect influence over the rest of the continent and huge swaths of the planet because of his spiritual authority, often intervening unilaterally in the affairs of other states.

But in 1849, the end began. A group of rebels founded the Roman Republic with the aim to establish a new state and enshrine freedom of religion into its constitution while guaranteeing the pope the right to govern the Catholic Church. The Republic only existed for a few months, but it did manage to seize Rome until French troops under Napoleon III restored the pope’s authority. Around the same time, people across Europe began to rise up against their monarchs, and Italy’s disparate regions united under leadership from Sardinia in the Risorgimento, or resurgence. France was pulled away from supporting the pope due to their war with Prussia, and a unified Italian army took Rome in September 1870, after which the pope retreated to the Vatican palace. No pope set foot outside the Vatican again until 1929.

With the Kingdom of Italy officially born, they tried to offer the pope guaranteed use of his facilities, freedom of communication, and an annual stipend, but the pope rejected all of this because he didn’t want to be perceived as a chaplain to the King of Italy. Accepting Italian law meant recognizing Italian sovereignty, and doing that would bar the pope from ever taking back control of his earthly dominion. But eventually, in 1929, the Vatican’s secretary of state signed the Lateran Pacts with none other than Benito Mussolini, which are the legal force behind the Vatican’s existence today. The Pacts created Vatican City as a sovereign state, recognized the Kingdom of Italy with Rome as its capital, and pledged perpetual neutrality. It also made Catholicism the state religion of Italy, which gave the pope substantial influence. Mussolini did this to reconcile his fascist state with the church and appease his people, while the pope did it to finally break out of his self-imposed prison and guarantee a role in Italian life.

Of course eventually Mussolini was removed from power. But in 1948, the new Italian Republic enshrined into its constitution that the state’s relations with the Catholic Church would be governed by the Lateran Pacts, allowing them to survive Mussolini, the monarchy, and the post-war reconstruction. Catholicism is no longer the state religion, but most aspects of the agreements remain today.

A lot of people don’t understand the differences between Vatican City and the Holy See, which governs the actual Catholic Church. The pope is the head of the Holy See. He runs the church as a non-state sovereign entity under international law. But he wears another hat as the monarch of Vatican City, because the Vatican is the territorial base that the Holy See needs to be functionally independent. These are technically separate things, but they coexist. When we see the pope interacting with another head of state, he’s technically doing it as the head of the Holy See and as the monarch of the Vatican.

Now, obviously a tiny state like the Vatican can’t maintain a military to defend itself. But Italy provides external defense, and of course there is the famous Swiss Guard whose members have been recruited from Switzerland to guard the Vatican since 1506. Italian police support Vatican City’s Corps of Gendarmerie on a regular basis as well. When arrests happen, Vatican courts can decline and hand a culprit over to Italy under the Lateran treaty’s court cooperation framework.

The Vatican uses the euro under a monetary agreement with the EU, though Italy mints currency on the Vatican’s behalf. In general, the Vatican relies heavily on Italian infrastructure and support, but it also own multiple properties on Italian soil, all of which have extraterritorial status like an embassy. These properties are actually far larger than Vatican City when combined.

The Vatican has full diplomatic relations of its own with 184 states, and 93 of those maintain an embassy in Rome that’s dedicated to the Holy See, with their own ambassadors separate from the ones for Italy. Notably, there are plenty of countries that have relations with Italy but not the Vatican, including places like Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and China. The Vatican also notoriously supported the Democrazia Cristiana, or Christian Democracy party in Italy, which was a dominant political faction for about 50 years until they dissolved in 1994, though the Vatican still wields heavy influence on day to day Italian politics when they want to.

Today the Italian government under right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is often at odds with the pope on social issues, but the two countries remain cordial with one another because they really have no other choice. Whether they like it or not, Italy and Vatican City are irrevocably entangled.

Keep reading

I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.