Modern Use
The Lateran remained in a suburban environment, surrounded by gardens and vineyards, until the growth of modern Rome in the later nineteenth century. Its site was considered unhealthy in Rome's malarial summers, however. In the late seventeenth century Innocent XII sited in part of it a hospice for orphans, who were set to work in a little silk manufactury. In the nineteenth century Gregory XVI and Pius IX founded in it a museum of religious art and pagan culture for overflow from the Vatican galleries.
In 1925 Pius XI established an ethnographic museum devoted to artifacts sent back by missionaries. On 11 February 1929 the Lateran Treaty was signed here, at last regulating the relations between the Holy See and the Italian State. It established that both the basilica and the Lateran Palace were extraterritorial properties of the Holy See, enjoying privileges similar to foreign embassies on Italian soil.
Read more about this topic: Lateran Palace
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