Vaticano – Castel Sant’Angelo
The City of the Vatican in Rome is an autonomous State governed directly by the Pontificate and officially recognized through the “Patti Lateranensi” of 1929 by the Italian Republic.
The State of the Vatican is located on the right shore of the Tevere River, around the Basilica of San Pietro, on the site of the antique “Ager Vaticanus”, where, during the first period of the Imperial Rome, among the numerous Christians who suffered the martyr, it seems that there was also San Pietro.
On the order of Mussolini, around 1936 , the urban asset of the area in front of the columns of Bernini was radically changed, and to leave the space for the “Via della Conciliazione”, parts of the antique villages were destroyed. The street, that obviously completely changes the meaning of the columns and the rapport the work had with the rest of the area, was above all the tangible sign of the willing to recompose in a definitive way the disunion between the Italian State and the Church by ideally unifying the Basilica of the Vatican with the centre of Rome and the buildings of Quirinale (Residence of the President of the Republic) and Campidoglio (Square designed by Michelangelo).
Nowadays the City of the Vatican is the smallest State of the world with its roughly 440,000 square metres, but it maintains the privileges of an independent State such as to have its own public representations, its own philatelic and numismatic values and official bodies of press office, such as the one of the Roman Observer.
Not far from Via della Conciliazione you’ll find one of the most significant monument of the Capital, Castel Sant’Angelo, the historical fortress that changed several times in the Middle Age and Renaissance.
Castel Sant’Angelo’s original structure and the Elio Bridge in front of it (nowadays known as Ponte Sant’Angelo), are built by the Architect Demetriano between 117 and 138 AD, as a mausoleum for the family of the Emperor Adriano.
The fortress, with its square plan of roughly 90 metres of length on the side, had a basement 14 metres high on which was standing a cylindrical body having a diameter of more or less 64 metres and a height of 21 metres, at the summit, on a hillock, was dressed up the statue of the Emperor. In 271 however, the structure, with the addiction of the defensive bastions, was transformed in outpost of the Aurelius walls on the right shore of the Tevere.
In 1277 Castel Sant’Angelo becomes the ownership of the State of the Church that means the complete transformation into fortress-jail connected to the Vatican Buildings.
The name of Castel Sant’Angelo originates from a miraculous apparition during the plague of 590 AD: according to tradition, Pope Gregorio Magno, praying in procession, would have had the vision of an angel who was casing the sword and he would have interpreted this gesture as the announcement of the end of the pestilence in the area.
In memory of the event, at the summit of Mole Adriana was placed a wood statue, afterwards substituted by a few versions in marble and by one in bronze melted in 1527 to forge guns; the actual statue, the sixth one, is the work of the artist Werschaffelt and is dating back to 1753.
Inside the fortress, which can nowadays be visited thanks to the relative National Museum of Castel Sant’Angelo, is made of five floors and includes, in addition to numerous rooms of Roman era, also many rooms with frescoes of age of Renaissance.
