Papal Plumbing

The Pope's Toilets

The Pope is the Bishop of Rome, considered to be the first among bishops and thus the leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

Italian history may be far more complicated than you think. There's much more to it than simply "First there was the Roman Empire, and now it's a country with pizza and spaghetti!"

The peninsula of Italy has been there since well before early humans first left Africa. The first known hominins arrived at Monte Poggiolo 850,000 years ago, and Homo neanderthalensis lived at several sites about 50,000 years ago. The earliest known modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, arrived in Italy at Riparo Mochi 36,000–37,000 years ago, during the upper Paleolithic.

However, the nation of Italy is only about 154 years old. The unified modern nation was not founded until the Risorgimento, which began with the end of Napoleon's rule in 1815 and was mostly completed with the capture of Rome in 1871, although Italy's national borders changed further after 1918 and 1945.

Part of page 161 of Shepherd's Historical Atlas showing the unification of Italy, from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas at Austin.

Rome wasn't sacked in a day. Power had shifted east, to Constantinople. The Eastern Empire, what came to be known as the Byzantine Empire after it had fallen to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, was the seat of power and culture.

The Western Empire crumbled into pieces through the fourth century and was gone before the end of the fifth. Romulus Augustus was the rather nominal last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire. He was deposed by the barbarian general Odoacer in 476.

Up to 1871, the Italian peninsula was home to a collection of various principalities, duchies, city-states, and kingdoms, along with the Papal States. Pepin the Short, King of the Franks, established the Papal States in 756 by giving Pope Stephen II control of a collection of territories in central Italy.

The Pope commanded armies organized from within his territories. Initially those armies were small, but he could also call on armies commanded by rulers throughout western Europe. That led to the Crusades, a series of religious wars in the 11th through 13th centuries in which the Popes sent western armies east to kill non-Christians. Since the Bishop of Rome and the Bishop of Constantinople had mutually excommunicated each other in 1054, and it was a long way to Jerusalem and the Arabs were tough fighters, Constantinople became a target. And then, Christians who weren't Roman Catholics were labeled as heretics and schismatics and also became targets.

Jumping forward to the mid 1800s, the newly organizing nation of Italy was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic but at the same time it was leery of a religious leader who had also been the reigning military leader for several violent centuries.

In 1861, the newly formed Italian Parliament proclaimed that Victor Emmanuel II was King of Italy and Rome was the nation's capital. Inconveniently, a French garrison under Napoleon III of France was occupying Rome and supporting the interests of Pope Pius IX.

Up north, the Franco-Prussian War began in July 1870. The French garrison was pulled out of Rome in early August, Widespread demonstrations called for the Italian government to take control of Rome. The Pope fought against this, forcing the Italian army to take the city by force.

The Pope at the time and the four succeeding Popes all denied the legitimacy of the Italian government. The national government promised the Pope the right to send and receive diplomats who would have full diplomatic immunity, as if the Pope were still the fully-empowered ruler of a state. And, the Pope was promised absolute liberty of movement within Italy and abroad.

However, each of the Popes declared himself to be a "Prisoner in the Vatican", a prisoner of the new nation of Italy. Each Pope refused to step outside the Vatican. That included refusing to enter Saint Peter's Square or to appear on the balcony of Saint Peter's Basilica which overlooks that square.

This situation continued for 59 years, until the Lateran Treaty of 1929 settled the disagreement between the Papacy and what by then was the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini. The treaty established Vatican City as a sovereign state located in an enclave within Rome.

Vatican City is a 49-hectare enclave enclosing Saint Peter's Basilica and the square in front of it, the Apostolic Palace, and associated church buildings. There are also several extraterritorial properties of the Papacy which have a status similar to that of foreign embassies. Those properties in and around Rome include the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran and the adjacent Lateran Palace, seen below, and the Vatican Radio transmitter site.

That's More Than Enough History, Let's See Some Toilets!

Neither of these are what you might call the Papal Throne. But they do answer the question "What's it like to pee at the Vatican, or perhaps one of the Papacy's extraterritorial possessions?"

Toilet at Saint Peter's Basilica Within Vatican City

Saint Peter's Basilica is the largest church in the world as measured by interior dimensions. The total size is 220 meters long by 150 meters wide, with an interior area of 15,160 m². This oval-shaped plaza in front of it holds over 80,000 people at major liturgical events.

Constantine the Great became Roman Emperor in 306. He moved his government east to the Greek-speaking city of Byzantium, which he soon renamed after himself, Κωνσταντινούπολις But he remembered the old home town after his conversion to Christianity, and he built the first Saint Peter's Basilica here in 319–333.

After the Vatican was largely abandoned and left unmaintained during the years of the Avignon Papacy in the 15th century, the old church needed to be replaced. Money for the replacement's construction was raised by the granting of indulgences in return for contributions. The indulgences were expensive, but they weren't deadly hazardous like marching off in Crusades to kill people who were Muslims or simply the wrong sort of Christians.

What you see today was designed through the 16th century by a series of architects, primarily Donato Bramante, Raphael, and then Michelangelo. Construction had started in 1506, continued past Michelangelo's death in 1564, and finished, briefly, in 1590. Then in 1607–1615, the nave was extended beyond that of Michelangelo's design.

People tend to use the word "cathedral" to refer to any large church, and the word "basilica" for any especially fancy large church. No, that's not what those words really mean.

The word basilica is, generally speaking, a term of architecture. It comes from the Greek basilikí or βασιλική and it refers to a rectangular public building with two interior rows of columns dividing the space into a central nave flanked by side aisles.

Confusingly, the Roman Catholic Church began using the same word to designate a church given special privileges to host certain rites. So, you could have a liturgical basilica that is not an architectural basilica, or vice-versa. Or, at ancient Greek and Roman sites, you will find many basilicas that weren't churches, they were the local government buildings. For example, the large basilica near the baths and latrines at Volubilis, in northern Morocco.

The Roman Catholic church has designated four basilicas (in the liturgical sense) as major papal basilicas. Saint Peter's is one, the other three are all in Rome and are those Papal possessions existing as extraterritorial enclaves within Italy.

Now, what about a Vatican toilet? Here's one at the Vatican Museums where you can experience the Sistine Chapel plus about 70,000 works including several of the world's best-known Roman sculptures and works of Renaissance art. Plus, this toilet which, being seatless, can be kept clean even under the heavy use in the second most-visited museum in the world after the Louvre in Paris.

Lateran Toilet

But wait, it gets more confusing. A cathedral, from the Greek καθέδρα or kathédra, is a church that is the seat of a bishop. Literally the "seat", that's a reference to the kathedra or the throne of the bishop. That means that Saint Peter's church at the Vatican is a basilica, one of just four Papal basilicas. But it's the second-ranking Papal basilica, because it is not a cathedral.

"But", you object, "the Pope is the Bishop of Rome!" Yes, that's correct. But Saint Peter's isn't the cathedral of that diocese. The seat of the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, is across town at the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran.

It's a cathedral because it's the seat of a bishop. It's a basilica in terms of its design and in terms of its Roman Catholic designation. And, it's the only archbasilica in the world because it's the one where the Pope is the bishop.

THe white marble part is the church. The yellow and red is the start of the Lateran Palace, which was the main residence of the Pope from the fourth century, when Constantine gave the Plautii Laterani family's estate to the Pope, through the following thousand years or so.

Here's an interior view up through the nave. Notice the columns and arches along each side. It's a basilica design.

Above is the crossing of the transept. There's the cathedra, the throne of the Bishop of Rome, at the center of the apse. When a Pope makes a special proclamation, like that one about Papal infallibility in 1870, he does it while sitting on that throne. He speaks ex cathedra, meaning "from the throne".

And the toilet? Of course I visited!