Free The Pope's Last Crusade by Peter Eisner Page B

among the people. The Catholic Church and its popes had governed Rome, the environs, and a broad swath of territory—the Vatican Free States—across central Italy for centuries. After decades of strife—the Napoleonic wars, the Franco-Prussian War—King Victor Emmanuel II consolidated modern Italy and seized Rome in 1870, relegating the remaining papal territory to the confines of the Vatican. For fifty-nine years the popes ranged no farther than the outer circle of the walls around St. Peter’s. Pius had made the strategic decision to conclude a historic treaty with the Italian state that would create guarantees for the Vatican and ultimately provide a new era of political importance and financial stability for the church. The successful negotiations culminated in 1929 with the Lateran Accords. The Lateran Accords designated the Vatican as a city-state and returned the 135-acre territory of Castel Gandolfo to the Holy See. As a result, the Vatican became a nation like any other country in the world. Now the pope was in search of global reach.
    Castel Gandolfo, its name of uncertain origin, had been a Roman retreat for almost two millennia as well as a refuge for Renaissance-era nobility. The site had first been used as a papal residence in the late sixteenth century, though by the 1900s it had fallen into disrepair. With the 1929 Lateran agreement, Pius XI authorized a major renovation. The new construction and landscaping linked three-hundred-year-old villas with lands where Roman emperor Domitian built a palace in the first century A.D. , subsequently expanded by his successors. Pius XI envisioned Castel Gandolfo as not only the summer home of the Vatican, but also as a modern working farm and self-sustaining community—dairy, stables, chickens and ducks, an olive grove, and a garden with housing for several dozen farm workers and other employees. A reporter touring the grounds as the renovations were under way in the early 1930s said that Castel Gandolfo would be “a spot of rare beauty . . . one of the loveliest spots on earth.”
    The pope moved into his renovated sanctuary in 1934, visited each year afterward, and spent six full months there in 1937. He expected to do the same this year, 1938. Key advisers from Rome spent the day, and some moved in for the season so he was able to conduct regular Vatican business all the while. But at break time, as often as his age and illnesses permitted him, the pope would take up his walking stick and stroll along the miles of cool shaded pathways.
    The atmosphere at Castel Gandolfo was indeed an important stimulus for the pope, better than being shuttered at St. Peter’s. The crisp air and rolling green cliffs surrounding Lake Albano were good for the soul. Open spaces, the countryside, and mountains had been part of his life before he took the throne of St. Peter.
    His first actions when he had taken office in 1922 signaled his expanded view of the role of the Vatican and the papacy. He emerged on the outer balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square and delivered the Urbi et Orbi blessing—to the city and the world—which hadn’t been done since 1870. His decision to step beyond the inner sanctum of the Vatican presaged a significant new role for his office and his stature beyond the Catholic Church. It was after this that he retook Castel Gandolfo.
    As he had once climbed peaks never scaled, he now sought other new heights. While some had criticized the 1929 Lateran Accords with Mussolini as an accommodation to the Fascist state, Pius XI used the new role of the church to spur a new era.
    But much more than that, the pope promoted and embraced modern science beyond the interests of any predecessor and won a rare distinction. In November 1931, the American magazine Popular Mechanics profiled the pope and his use of technology. “Always the twentieth century wins out, always the old gives way to the new,” the article