Fifty-nine years ago when ten-month-old Vittorio Emanuele, Prince of Naples, swung a royal rattle, and 13-year-old Achille Ratti declined irregular verbs in a Milan seminary, the troops of small Vittorio's grandfather, Vittorio Emanuele II, King of Sardinia, recently proclaimed King of Italy, stormed and breached the walls of the Papal city of Rome.
"I give thanks to God," wrote Pius IX. "who has permitted Your Majesty to fill the last days of my life with bitterness. I pray God to dispense to you his mercy, which you so much need."
From that day no Pope left his self-imposed "imprisonment" within the comparatively narrow confines of the Vatican, no member of the Italian Royal Family set foot on Papal ground. At last came the Lateran Treaties, re-establishing the temporal power of the Pope (TIME, Feb. 18). Last week the onetime Prince of Naples, now King of Italy, called on the onetime Achille Ratti, now Pope Pius XI. To 40 million Italians, to 331 million Roman Catholics, it was a day of reconciliation never to be forgotten.
For safety's sake, no advance news was given of the route that the King and Queen would take in their ride from Quirinal Palace to Vatican Palace. The huge oval of St. Peter's Square was kept free of spectators. From dawn on the day appointed, crowds of pious, enthusiastic Romans jammed the sidewalks of every street through which the royal pair could possibly pass, whiled away the long hours playing lottery games. Enterprising peddlers did a rushing business selling envelopes containing numbers shrewdly dubbed the "favorites" of the Pope, the King, the Queen. Many a Roman policeman unbent to buy tickets himself and play with the crowd.
Motor horns honked, grey-green soldiers snapped to present arms, and a fleet of eight cars, preceded and followed by bicycle policemen, swept through the streets. To the disappointment of the crowds, the royal procession was quite as informal as the usual public appearances of Herbert Hoover.
Whatever the Royal cortège lacked in grandeur was more than made up by pomp displayed by the Supreme Pontiff. At the technical frontier of the minuscule Vatican State the eight motor cars stopped. There, brilliant in the warm December sunshine stood Commendatore Serafini, Governor of Vatican City; Prince Massimo, Papal Postmaster General, gorgeous in hose, doublet and a stiff medieval ruff, with a red-plumed morion on his head; and Commendatore de Mandato, general of the Pope's Armies. Out of his automobile stepped short-legged Vittorio Emanuele III, in the grey-green and silver dress uniform of a field marshal. From his hat sprouted a white aigrette, round his neck hung the flashing gold chain of the Collar of the Annunziata, on his breast blazed medals. Towering a good head and shoulders above him stood Queen Elena.
She was all in white, high-necked, long-sleeved, as Vatican etiquette demands. Half shrouded by a white lace mantilla, her regal head carried a proud coronet, and upon the black cordon of Malta across her bosom depended in eight strands the fabulous Pearls of Savoy, huge as pale butter balls.