What 'Vatican' means, from the Ager Vaticanus to St Peter's hill

What Vatican means looks like a question with an easy answer, and it isn’t. Let me be honest from the outset. There’s no certain answer, and anyone who gives you just one without caveats is simplifying. What there is, though, is a lovely story about a name that existed centuries before the popes and that they inherited along with a grave.

A name older than the Church

According to the Governorate’s website, under Rome’s kings and the Republic the area was known as the Ager Vaticanus. It was a wide stretch of land on the right bank of the Tiber, reaching north as far as the mouth of the Cremera and at least to the Janiculum. The form Vaticanum is recorded from the 2nd century AD and referred to an area similar to today’s state.

It was countryside outside the city. There were villas, the gardens of Agrippina, Caligula’s mother, and large cemeteries along the roads. Caligula laid out a circus there for his charioteers, which Nero later enlarged, and adorned it with the obelisk now in the square. That stone is the only survivor of the Roman landscape, and it has its own page, the Vatican obelisk.

A marsh between two bridges

There’s a line on the state’s own website that changes how I picture the place. It says that in antiquity «Vatican» meant the marshy land on the right bank of the Tiber between Ponte Milvio and today’s Ponte Sisto. So a low, waterlogged strip running several kilometres along the river, not one particular hill or shrine. Treccani adds that the old ager was far larger than what we now call the Vatican, and that the name gradually narrowed to the high ground by the Tiber.

The circus I mentioned had a name of its own. The Governorate calls it the Gaianum and describes it as a small circus built for charioteers to train in, later reworked by Nero. This was no grand arena for crowds like the Circus Maximus, but a practice track on an unappealing edge of town. I find it a good reminder that the most visited spot in Rome began as the city’s soggy outskirts.

If you walk north along the river today from Ponte Sisto, you’re roughly tracing the edge of that ancient Vatican. I cover the neighbouring district on that route in what to see in Borgo.

What does the word Vatican mean?

This is where the theories come in, all of them from the Treccani Enciclopedia Italiana, not a Vatican source but a serious reference. The ancient explanation linked the name to ‘vates’ and ‘vaticinium’, seers and prophecy. It’s the one most repeated online, which is why so many sites say Vatican means ‘place of prophecy’.

Modern scholars instead derive it from an old settlement called Vaticum, in the same way Labicanum comes from Labicum. And Varro, the Roman scholar, connected it to a god who protected a newborn baby’s first cries, an idea already argued over in antiquity. The settlement theory seems the most sensible to me, but there’s no official etymology, so I’d rather give you all three.

The Vatican Hill

The state stands on a low rise near the right bank of the Tiber which, according to the Governorate, was part of the Montes Vaticani, the colle Vaticano of antiquity. It isn’t one of the seven hills of classical Rome, which were on the other side of the river. It was, precisely, outside.

And that explains why the name ended up belonging to the Church. Peter was buried in a grave on the southern slope of that hill, facing Nero’s circus, according to the Fabbrica di San Pietro. A small monument was built over it in the 2nd century, and around AD 324 Constantine’s basilica. To stand on that slope, you have to go down into the Vatican necropolis.

From hill to district to state

Between 848 and 852 Pope Leo IV walled the area after the Saracen raid of 846, and that ‘civitas Leoniana’ is the origin of the Borgo district, whose name comes from the Saxon ‘Burg’, a walled village. Next door is Prati, named after the meadows beside Hadrian’s Mausoleum. The three names, Vatican, Borgo and Prati, describe the landscape before the city.

The current official name, Vatican City State, is much more recent. It was born with the Lateran Pacts of 1929. The whole story is in my guide to Vatican history, and if you like these small details, there are more among the Vatican City facts.

The other names you’ll see

On your trip you’ll meet several versions of the same name. In Italian it’s Città del Vaticano, and the full official name is Vatican City State. On addresses and post, the postcode 00120 Città del Vaticano. Online, the .va domain, which according to IANA is run by the Governorate and dates from 11 September 1995. On passports, the code VAT, shared by the Holy See and the state.

On the road it has its own letters too. The Vatican vehicle register uses two, SCV for cars belonging to the state and Holy See bodies, and CV for those of citizens and people granted Vatican plates, and the international code is V. The official site doesn’t spell out what each abbreviation stands for, so I won’t make it up. And the phone code is a curiosity in itself. The ITU keeps +379 set aside for it, though calls still go through the Italian code. And don’t mix any of this up with the Holy See, which is the Church’s government, not a synonym, as I explain in Holy See and Vatican City.