The world’s smallest country has fewer than a thousand residents
Vatican City State, a papal enclave inside Rome, covers 44 hectares with about 882 residents in 2024—the smallest country by area and population, and the only one under a thousand people. The Lateran Treaty of 11 February 1929 created the modern state, named for Vatican Hill.
Ruled by the pope, the state is run through the Holy See, which is itself sovereign in international law, and it houses the central administration of the Catholic Church; the word Vatican often stands for the Holy See as a whole. Its formal Italian name is Stato della Città del Vaticano, and the Latin Status Civitatis Vaticanae appears in official church documents.
St Peter’s Basilica, the Sistine Chapel, the Apostolic Library and the Vatican Museums hold some of the world’s most celebrated paintings and sculptures. Money comes from donations by Catholics, stamps and souvenirs, museum tickets and publications. There are no taxes, and goods are duty-free. The Pontifical Swiss Guard serves as its de facto military.
The name is far older than the state. In Republican Rome, Ager Vaticanus described a marshy stretch on the Tiber’s west bank between the Janiculum, the Vatican Hill and Monte Mario; after the first century AD, Vaticanus came to mean just the hill and the ground of today’s St Peter’s Square. Close to the Etruscan rival city of Veii and prone to flooding, the area struck Romans as gloomy and unwholesome, and the root itself may be Etruscan.
The poet Martial mocked the local wine, and Tacitus recorded that soldiers who backed Vitellius in AD 69 camped in the unhealthy Vatican district and died in large numbers after drinking from the Tiber in the heat. Agrippina the Elder drained the land for gardens in the early first century AD, villas followed, and in AD 40 her son Caligula began a chariot circus there that Nero completed, known as the Circus of Nero.
Source: Vatican City
