Word: royale
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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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...
...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...
Silver trumpets fanfared. The royal procession moved across St. Peter's Square. Like medieval statues, a platoon of the famed Swiss Guards stood at attention in the scarlet, green and yellow uniforms designed for them by Michael Angelo. Sunlight gleamed from the polished steel of halberd, morion, breastplate, pauldron, rerebrace. Under the Bernini colonnade, the Palatine Guards, more "efficient section of the Pope's army, snapped modern rifles to the present...