Vatican City: The Smallest Country on Earth in Stunning 4K

In the heart of Rome, enclosed by walls a thousand years old, stands Vatican City, the smallest country on earth and the spiritual home of more than a billion Catholics. It covers just 44 hectares. You could walk across it in 20 minutes, yet its voice carries to every continent on the planet. Peter's Square spreads before the Basilica inside Bernini's great colonnades, two arms of stone reaching out, as Bernini said, to embrace the world. At its centre stands an Egyptian obelisk carried to Rome 2,000 years ago. It stood beside the circus where tradition holds St. Peter himself was martyred. St. Peter's Basilica is the largest church in the world, raised over the tomb of the Apostle Peter, on the ground where he was buried after his execution under Nero. It took 120 years to build. Bramante began it, Michelangelo reshaped it, Bernini gave it glory, and 60,000 people can stand at pride inside it. Michelangelo took charge of the Great Dome in his 70s and worked on it until his death. He never saw it finished, yet every dome raised since has lived in its shadow. Inside, the dome floats above the altar in rings of golden mosaic, and the letters of the inscription around its base stand nearly two metres tall, each one higher than a man. Bernini's bronze canopy, the baldachin, twists above the papal altar. The bronze, they say, was stripped from the pantheon to cast it. Past the tombs of popes, archaeologists digging in the 1940s find a small red wall and a niche of bones. The resting place, the church believes, of Peter himself. In the side chapel rests the Pieta, Mary holding her son, carved by Michelangelo when he was 24 years old. It is the only work he ever signed. Around 800 people live in this country and no one is born a citizen. Citizenship comes with the job, priest, official or guardsman. And it ends when the job does, is guarded by the Swiss Guard. 135 men recruited from the villages of Switzerland. Every May, the newest recruits swear their oath in the courtyard, in uniforms whose stripes have barely changed in a hundred years. This tiny state runs like a country in miniature. Its own post office, its own pharmacy, its own radio station speaking to the world in dozens of languages, and its own euro coins, minted with the Pope's image and hunted by collectors everywhere. Its living comes from the millions who climb this hill, from the museums, from the famous postage stamps and from Peter's pence, the offerings of the faithful, given since the days of kings in England. The Vatican Museums began with a single statue dug from a Roman vineyard in 1506. Five centuries of popes later, the collection fills seven kilometres of galleries. Seventy thousand works are kept here, twenty thousand of them on display. To stand before each one for a single minute would take 48 days and nights. Marble hounds, horses and lions have stood in their silent zoo for over two centuries. Carved under the emperors and gathered here by popes. A gallery of maps runs 120 metres Italy painted wall by wall in gold and blue. 40 maps drawn from the surveys of a friar scientist and still startlingly true to the land. When the pinecone courtyard turns the sphere within a sphere, a bronze globe cracked open to show the world moving inside it. The work of Arnaldo Pomodoro, out winds down the great spiral staircase. Two ramps in a single shell, so those who descend never cross those who climb. A design first dreamed five centuries ago, and still ahead of its time. Lawns, fountains and quad woods covering half the country, where popes have walked in the I've been in the evening quad for 700 years. Passetto runs from the Vatican Palace to Castel Sant'Angelo on the River Tiber. Along it, in 1527, the Pope is said to have fled barefoot as Rome was sacked around him. And when night settles over the river and the dome turns to gold, the smallest country on earth remains what it has always been. Not a kingdom of land, but of faith.