Twelve Vatican City facts hardly anyone tells you, all with a source

Countless Vatican facts do the rounds, and a good share have no source beyond another website that copied them. I’ve done the opposite here. I’ve picked twelve I could check against official sources, ranked them by how much they surprised me, and told you where to see them, because several are in the square and free.

A country where nobody is born a citizen

This is my favourite. Nobody is Vatican by birth or by descent. It comes with residence for an office or job, and it’s lost when that job ends. The result is tiny numbers. At the end of 2024, of its 618 citizens only 246 lived inside, and 104 of those were Swiss Guards. Counting non-citizens, there were 882 inhabitants.

The territory is just as odd. It’s 0.44 km², 44 hectares, and the Vatican Gardens take up about 22 of them, half the state. You can only see them with a guide or from the open-top bus, as covered in the Vatican Gardens.

Facts you can see free in the square

St Peter’s Square hides two details almost nobody looks for. The first is in the paving around the obelisk. In 1817 sixteen marble discs were set there naming the winds, and on the basilica side someone carved ‘west’, in English, while the far side reads ‘est’ rather than ‘east’. The Holy See’s website mentions it with some amusement. It’s the only foreign word in the square, and I cover it with the meridian line on the page about the Vatican obelisk.

The second is up on the basilica facade. Its two clocks look like twins, but the right-hand one as you face it has only one hand, because it kept time the old Italian way, from dusk. On the same facade, to the left, hang six bells which, when they ring all at once, confirm there’s a new pope. It’s all on my page about St Peter’s facade.

A state with state-sized quirks

Since 1970 the only armed force the Vatican has kept is the Swiss Guard. It does have police, the Gendarmerie, and its own courts, with appeal and cassation, as I explain in Vatican police and army.

It also has its own dialling code, +379, assigned by the International Telecommunication Union but marked as reserved for future use. In practice it uses Italy’s +39, and its numbers start with +39 06 698. Online, its suffix is .va, which dates from 1995. And there’s a curious limit on money. It uses the euro by agreement with the European Union, but may mint at most a million euros’ worth of coins a year, and they’re struck in Italy.

History in small details

Vatican Radio was opened by Pius XI on 12 February 1931 and built by Guglielmo Marconi, the radio pioneer. The state’s anthem, the Pontifical March, has music by Charles Gounod written in 1869 and has been official since 1949, by decision of Pius XII. Another oddity hides in the list of popes, where there has never been a John XX.

The obelisk in the square, meanwhile, is the only one in Rome without hieroglyphs, and it was already here when Peter died, as it decorated Caligula’s circus. And the Vatican has a telescope in the United States. The Specola’s VATT sits high on Mount Graham in Arizona, and I tell the story on the Vatican Observatory page.

A state that spills beyond its walls

This one is my favourite to explain with numbers. The state covers 44 hectares, yet the extraterritorial zone at Castel Gandolfo, which belongs to the Holy See while sitting on Italian soil, covers 55, according to Vatican News. In other words, the papal villas by the lake take up more ground than the country itself. I go through it properly in Castel Gandolfo.

It isn’t the only case. The Lateran Treaty leaves three of Rome’s four major basilicas, the Lateran, St Mary’s and St Paul’s, owned by the Holy See along with their adjoining buildings, and the state’s website notes that its jurisdiction reaches parts of Rome and beyond. There’s even a Vatican Post branch at the Lateran University, right in Rome, using the Vatican’s 00120 postcode.

Flag, coins and cardinals

The yellow and white flag was raised for the first time on 8 June 1929, the day after the state came into being in practice. The colours are older, adopted in 1808 to replace the yellow and red used before. There’s more on the Vatican flag page.

Gold coins have a stop-start history. They were minted from 1929 to 1959, dropped, then revived in 1996 on the road to the 2000 Jubilee, and have come out every year since. Together with the silver ones, they’re the only Vatican coins that aren’t legal tender in Italy.

And a population figure I find telling. At the end of 2024, 66 cardinals held Vatican citizenship, but only 10 lived inside the state. Most people with a Vatican passport actually live abroad, mainly diplomatic staff.

A pharmacy, and a stamp that doesn’t exist

Two practical facts to finish. The Vatican Pharmacy isn’t just for residents. Anyone with a paper prescription can buy there, after getting a pass at St Anne’s. And the famous passport stamp doesn’t exist. No official website offers it. What you can take home is a Vatican postmark on a postcard.

If you’re after more, the Sistine Chapel facts have a list of their own, and the big underlying question I answer in is the Vatican a country?.