The story of this place
On 20 September 1870, Italian army artillery blasted a breach in the ancient Aurelian Walls near the Porta Pia, and bersaglieri troops poured into Rome. After a brief fight the papal garrison surrendered, ending over a thousand years of the Papal States and the temporal power of the popes. The capture completed Italian unification; Rome became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy in 1871, and Pope Pius IX retreated into the Vatican as the self-styled 'prisoner in the Vatican,' a standoff not resolved until the 1929 Lateran Treaty. The date, 'XX Settembre,' names streets across Italy. A monument and column near the gate mark the spot where the modern Italian state was born.