1 Dollar The End of the Papal State 1870

In September 1870, Italian Bersaglieri troops breached the Aurelian Wall at Porta Pia, ending over a thousand years of direct papal territorial rule. Pius IX refused to recognize the new Italian state and confined himself to the Vatican, where he and his successors remained self-declared prisoners until the Lateran Treaty of 1929. Palau, which has issued commemorative dollars on almost every conceivable historical subject since the late 1990s, added this episode to its catalog in 2009 — nearly 140 years after the breach.