Prisoner in the Vatican the Basilica of St. John Lateran, situated on the opposite side of the city of Rome, and to travel regularly to their summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, from Rome. Prisoner in the Vatican A prisoner in the Vatican or prisoner of the Vatican (; ) is how Pope Pius IX was described following the capture of Rome by the armed forces of the Kingdom of Italy on 20 September 1870. Part of the process of Italian unification, the city's capture ended the millennial temporal rule of the popes over central Italy and allowed Rome to be designated the capital of
Prophecy of the Popes the Roman". In the "Lignum Vitae", the line "In persecutione extrema S.R.E. sedebit." forms a separate sentence and paragraph of its own. While often read as part of the "Peter the Roman" prophecy, other interpreters view it as a separate, incomplete sentence explicitly referring to one or more popes between "the glory of the olive" and "Peter the Roman". The list can be divided into two groups; one of the popes and antipopes who reigned prior to the appearance of the prophecies c. 1590, for whom the connection between the motto and the pope is consistently clear. The other is