Lateran Palace

This is the ancient papal seat, in which all the Bishops of Rome lived from the Fourth to the Fourteenth Centuries, when the center of papal authority was moved to Avignon in France. From 1377, after the end of the captivity in Avignon, the papal seat was moved to the Vatican. Sixtus V commissioned the restoration of the ancient building to Domenico Fontana who built, among other things, the Loggia of Blessings and did the work on the piazza with the egyptian obelisk of  Tuthmosis (Fifteenth Century B.C.) brought to Rome in  357 and placed in the Circus Maximus.

THINGS TO KNOW: In this building on 11 February 1929, the Lateran Pact was signed which ended ongoing difficulties between the Kingdom of Italy and the Vatican leading to the State of Vatican City including its extraterritorial seats of which the Lateran is one.