TouchéGet the appFor 59 years, no pope would step outside the Vatican
When Italy took Rome in 1870 and made it the capital, Pope Pius IX refused to accept it.
On September 20, 1870, Italian troops broke through the walls of Rome near the Porta Pia and took the city from the pope's army. They stopped at one district: the walled area around the Vatican, on the far bank of the Tiber.
Italy's government offered to let Pope Pius IX keep that district as a state of his own. He turned it down. He wanted back the territory he had lost, and he said that with his army disbanded he could not keep order even in so small a place.
In October the people of Rome voted to join Italy. Residents of the Vatican district were allowed to vote, but they had to do it outside its walls. Pius excommunicated the invaders, King Victor Emmanuel II included. In 1871 Rome became Italy's capital, and the Quirinal Palace, which had been a residence of the popes, became the king's.
In May 1871 Italy's parliament passed the Law of Guarantees. It gave the pope royal honors, his own guards, the right to send and receive ambassadors, the Vatican and Lateran palaces, and a payment every year.
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Pius rejected all of it, the money included. His objection was to where the guarantees came from. They were an Italian law, and he pointed out that a law passed by two houses of parliament could be repealed by them just as easily. Accepting it would have meant accepting that Italy had the right to grant it. He declared himself a prisoner in the Vatican.
He never went out again. Neither did the four popes after him: once elected, none of them set foot outside the Vatican. Their own cathedral, St. John Lateran, stood on the other side of Rome, and they stayed away from it.
The standoff ended on February 11, 1929, in the Lateran Palace. Cardinal Pietro Gasparri signed for Pope Pius XI, and Benito Mussolini signed for the king. Italy recognized a new independent state of about 109 acres, Vatican City. The pope recognized the Kingdom of Italy, with Rome as its capital.
After that the popes went out again, across Rome to St. John Lateran and to their summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, about 19 miles from the city.