The Vatican Gardens Military Zone was an area of the Vatican's gardens occupied by the Blackshirts in late October 1937 with barracks established west of the Apostolic Palace.
History[]
In October 1937, taking advantage of the Pope's absence due to ill health, Prime Minister Benito Mussolini moved Fascist military forces into the Vatican. In the process, Blackshirts were stationed in barracks in a section of the Vatican Gardens. Although their presence was explained away as a purge of subversive Communist material within the Holy See, the reality was that the Fascist presence was a coordinated effort to give Nazi archaeologist Emmerich Voss access to the secret archive and its collection of Great Circle artifacts.[1]
Chasing a Cat Mummy stolen from Marshall College and unaware of its greater significance, Voss' American rival Indiana Jones arrived in the Holy City. During that time, he met a distraught Professor Aldrich Savage who, not recognizing the disguised Jones as a professional counterpart, told him that the Blackshirts had detained his apprentice Sidney. Jones rescued the young man from the barracks and pointed him to the Apostolic Library where his friend Father Antonio Morello kept an office.[1]
Behind the scenes[]
The Vatican Gardens Military Zone, simply identified as "Blackshirt Barracks" in Indiana Jones' Adventure Journal, first appeared in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle but the game area wasn't formally identified until the release of "The Order of Giants" DLC, which updated and expanded the Vatican Gardens as a playable space.[2]