Vatican City

Vatican City, also known as the Vatican, is a city-state situated within Rome, Italy.

Although the nation itself is comparatively new, established in 1929 following Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's signing of the Lateran Treaty, the area itself has been governed by the Holy See for centuries.

Adventures in Vatican City[]

In October of 1937, Indiana Jones headed to Vatican City after an apparent giant broke into Marshall College and stole an ornate mummified cat that Indiana had unearthed six weeks previously in Siwa, Egypt. The only clue to the giant's identity was a medallion he had inadvertently left behind that bore an emblem similar to that of the Vatican Secret Archive. Before arriving at the Vatican, Indiana was alerted via telegram from his old friend, Father Antonio Morello, that Italy's fascist regime controlled entry to the Holy See, forcing Indiana to sneak in via the Castel Sant'Angelo causeway and disguise himself as a priest to avoid scrutiny. The situation in the Vatican turned out to be precarious: the pope had recently fallen ill and his ambitious personal secretary, Father Cesare Ventura, was effectively running the city with backing from Benito Mussolini. In exchange for Mussolini's support, Ventura gave the Blackshirts free run of the Vatican, allowing them to oversee archaeological and renovation projects, as well as confiscate any books and relics they deemed to contain communist messaging. Members of the clergy who disagreed with Ventura's power grab and close relationship with the fascists were cowed into silence by the Blackshirts.^[1]

Indiana began his investigation of the giant's medallion in the Apostolic Library, where he found that the medallion could be used as a key to unlock a secret chamber beneath the building, confirming the giant's relationship with the Vatican. More clues led him to a Roman Empire-era necropolis accessed via the Tower of Nicolas V, which contained the tomb of Augur the Giant, a warrior from the First Crusade who led an organization called the Nephilim Order and decreed that its monastic headquarters be built under the Fountain of the Sacrament. Along the way, Indiana met and befriended Gina Lombardi, a journalist who was searching the Vatican for her missing sister, Laura, a leading expert in languages. The two entered the Nephilim Order's headquarters and gleaned from records stored within that the Order was interconnected with the highest echelons of the Catholic Church. They also discovered a passageway into the Vatican's secret storeroom of esoteric treasures, among which was the stolen cat mummy. Before Indiana could recover the cat mummy, he was accosted by the giant, Locus. On the heels of subduing Locus, Father Ventura led Mussolini and Nazi archaeologist Emmerich Voss into the treasure room, where Voss and his henchmen proceeded to break open a series of artifacts, including the cat mummy, that the Order had collected to retrieve other, more valuable artifacts concealed within. These hidden artifacts pertained to the Great Circle. Indiana and Gina followed Voss's party to the top of St. Peter's Basilica and then covertly boarded Voss's airship as it departed for Giza, where Voss was running a large-scale excavation to dig up another Great Circle artifact for a top secret Nazi initiative called the Great Circle Project.^[1]

Indiana revisited the Vatican four years later in pursuit of notes by the Greek scholar Solon.^[2]