Modern Life
If you walk up to Vatican City while touring the streets of Rome, you certainly don't feel like you're leaving one country and entering another. There are no passport windows or other obvious borders, just a sudden swarm of tourists inside a walled compound that has been an intimidating presence since its earliest years. You'll know you're getting close when the price of a gelato goes from 20. If you're traveling on a budget, be sure to dine before making your way to the city's immediate outskirts.
Essential
If you want to join the 800 or so people with current citizenship in Vatican City, then you will likely have to get a job working inside the Vatican. Typically, once a person's employment by the Vatican has ended, his or her citizenship is revoked. Some Vatican citizens hold dual passports, with the other one usually being from Italy.
Day-to-Day Business
Vatican City does have its own police force, separate from that of Rome, and it issues its own stamps and coins (a Vatican version of the euro). The millions of tourists who purchase stamps at and mail letters from the Vatican City post office each year contribute greatly to the nation-state's income.
There is an ATM in Vatican City, but it gives instructions for making deposits and withdrawals in Latin, making it perhaps the only one of its kind on the planet. So you can get an ATM receipt as a souvenir of your visit, but unless you are an expert in ancient Roman languages, you may accidentally take out more money than you had intended in the process. As with any government entity, Vatican City has a website. You can check it out at
Tourism
An estimated 4.2 million people visit Vatican City each year, making it among the top forty destinations in the world. (About the same number of people visit the Statue of Liberty in New York and the Grand Canyon in Arizona annually.) There are no official statistics about how many of these visitors are Catholic; many people visit Vatican City not for religious reasons, but to appreciate the architecture and masterworks housed within the city walls.
Alert
You can't just walk into a Mass at St. Peter's Basilica and ask to have your baby baptized. You have to make reservations in advance, and the only way to do so is by fax. When dialing from within the United States, that number is (011) 39 06 698 85793.
By sheer numbers, 4.2 million visitors to a space of just 110 acres is overwhelming, and you can expect to find crowds at Vatican City pretty much year-round. Mass is celebrated several times a day, seven days a week, with the biggest crowds attending services during Easter and Christmas. During national holidays in Italy, there have been as many as 10,000 people standing in serpentine lines that wind through the nearby streets and alleyways, waiting to get inside St. Peter's Basilica and the Vatican Museums.
As of this writing, Mass was being celebrated at St. Peter's Basilica from Monday through Saturday at 9
