On November 21, 1929, Benito Mussolini's government formally approved the demolition project that would create the Via della Conciliazione, a broad avenue linking the Tiber to St. Peter's Square. The street symbolized the 1929 Lateran Treaty that ended decades of hostility between the Italian state and the Papacy, though it required flattening the ancient Borgo neighborhood, a decision still debated by preservationists.
For nearly sixty years after Italian unification in 1870, the Pope considered himself a 'prisoner' in the Vatican, refusing to recognize the Kingdom of Italy that had annexed Rome and the Papal States. The rupture, known as the Roman Question, poisoned Italian politics and left the Vatican diplomatically isolated.
Mussolini, eager for the legitimacy and popular support that reconciliation with the Church would bring, negotiated the Lateran Treaty, signed in February 1929. It created Vatican City as a sovereign state and settled the dispute. As a monumental flourish, planners decided the approach to St. Peter's needed a grand processional avenue rather than the cramped medieval alleys of the Spina di Borgo.
Approving the plan on November 21, 1929, meant condemning an entire neighborhood, ancient churches, tenements, and shops, to the wrecking ball. Critics, then and now, mourn the loss of a labyrinthine quarter that had greeted pilgrims for centuries, replaced by a wide, fascist-era boulevard that gives St. Peter's Basilica an imposing, almost theatrical approach visible from far down the street.