Vatican City

Vatican City

Population: 826

Capital: Vatican City

Government: Ecclesiastical
Language: Italian

The next smallest country on the list is Vatican City, probably the only country where you have to leave and move to another once your job ends. It's a city, it's a capital, a country and on top of all of that it holds some of the finest pieces of art known to mankind. It's population is mostly made up of employees, aka, clergy and clergymen and currently 43 laypersons. It's the home of Pope, burial ground of the apostle, Peter and the unwilling background for the feature film Angels & Demons, starring Tom Hanks, written by Dan Brown. For everything you'd want to know factual and otherwise about the city here is it's wiki page.

Below is a map of the entire city, which to me looks more like a college campus then a country.

I spent the day visiting using Google Earth. It's really the most useful tool there is for virtual travel via the Internet. It works better with cable or DSL but I've had it work on dial up too. When it began it was just satellite shots that you could zoom in on and find anything visible from space. Now, however, a new feature was added where users of Panoromia can put pinpoint links to pictures of the area you are zooming in on that they took and I have to say most pictures offered are really very impressive and fun to look at.

Viewing Vatican City this way, I started off with zooming and roaming through the gardens and making my way up to St. Peter's. I had to stop there for today because the pictures lead me to other interesting links and gave me an idea on how I would like to look at the whole city, which I am posting next.