LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Vatican: Vatican Hill
built 665 days ago
In 1377 Pope Gregory XI began to reside in a house on Vatican Hill. The popes who followed made repeated additions, and gradually the house became a palace. Today the Vatican Palace is a collection of buildings of different periods that cover some 13 acres (5.5 hectares) and contain more than 1,400 rooms. Much of the surrounding area consists of formal gardens.
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Most people don't realize that Vatican City, built squarely on Vatican Hill, isn't one of the seven hills for which Rome is famous! Unfortunately for the fevered anti-Catholic theories that Dave Hunt and others traffic in, the Catholic Church's headquarters — Vatican City — sits on the other side of the Tiber river, and not on any of the seven hills. The Tiber formed a natural boundary for the city limits of ancient Rome. The seven hills were on one side, snug inside the city walls. Vatican Hill sat across the river, in sight of the old city, but not technically part of it — so close but yet so far.
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In 1891, Pope Leo XIII formally re-founded the Vatican Observatory and moved it to a hillside behind the dome of Saint Peters Basilica. In 1933, banished by the glare of Romes night sky, the observatory moved 22 miles (35 kilometers) to the southeast, to Castel Gandolfo. The papal palace was built around 1590 as a villa for Maffeo Barberini, who later became Pope Urban VIII. It was Urban who orchestrated the trial of Galileo; today it is his former villa the Vatican telescope domes crown.
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