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Capital status
Rome is currently a comune, as well as the seat of the Regione
Lazio (one of the twenty regions of Italy) and of the Province
of Rome (one of the five provinces of the Lazio region). The
current Mayor of Rome is Walter Veltroni, elected in 2001
and again for a second term in 2006. A current political debate
in Italy focuses on the opportunity of providing the city
with "special powers" of local jurisdiction (the
"Roma Capitale" directives) and possibly of turning
either the comune or the Province of Rome into a "capital
district" separate from the Lazio region, modelled after
Washington, D.C..
Other sovereign states
Rome is unique in its containing two other sovereign states.
One is the Holy See, the political and religious entity that
governs the territory of the Vatican City (a de facto enclave
since 1870, officially recognised as such in 1929), as well
as claiming extraterritorial rights over a few other palaces
and churches, mostly in the city centre indeed, Rome hosts
foreign embassies to both Italy and the Holy See. The other
state is the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM), which
took refuge in Rome in 1834 after having lost Malta to Napoleon
in 1798, and thus currently claims no territory (leading to
disputes over its actual sovereign status); SMOM too owns
extraterritorial palaces in central Rome.
International involvement
Rome has traditionally been heavily involved in the process
of European political integration. In 1957, the city hosted
the signing of the treaty of Rome, which established the European
Economic Community (predecessor to the current European Union),
and also played host to the official signing of the proposed
European constitution in July 2004. Rome is also the seat
of significant international organisations, such as the Food
and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and is
the place where the Rome Statute of the International Criminal
Court was formulated. |
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