Rome and the Vatican? Two thousand years of love and hate

He may be their bishop, but Romans haven't always loved their pope and the death of the Pope John Paul II has brought back to the surface the longstanding love-hate relationship that has marked relations between Rome and the Vatican for millennia.

He may be their bishop, but Romans haven't always loved their pope and the death of the Pope John Paul II has brought back to the surface the longstanding love-hate relationship that has marked relations between Rome and the Vatican for millennia.

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As more than a million thronged the Vatican neighborhood in the heart of the Italian capital to see the body of the pope lying in state in Saint Peter's Basilica, some Romans were already feeling invaded.

"It scares me," said Sara Paoloni, who works in a nearby stationery shop.

"It's like an invasion of aliens," she said, smoking a cigarette at the entrance of her shop before the one of the three giant queues.

"We really love the Holy Father, but he's really made life complicated for us!" exclaimed Anna Salbi, a retired employee of Rome's appeal court.

A lot of the love for the Polish-born pontiff is newfound, said Leszek Hubert Bigus, a Polish immigrant working in a fruit and vegetable stand in central Rome.

"They're all suffering from amnesia, but they always used to say that they were the ones paying for his trips with their taxes," said Bigus.

On the square where Bigus has worked for 12 years stands a statue of Giordano Bruno, an Italian poet and priest burnt at the stake on the orders of the pope as a heretic in 1600.

The statue was erected soon after Italian forces captured Rome from the papal army and made it the capital of the newly-created Italian state in 1870.

It took more than 50 years for Italy and the Vatican to sign a peace treaty regulating their relations, when Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini signed an agreement in 1929 with Pope Pius XI, known as the Lateran Pacts.

Still, Rome was not entirely free.

Mussolini declared it a "sacred city" and promised that nothing would be allowed to desecrate it.

Plays, movies, and even movie-posters bearing the image of voluptuous Sophia Loren or Gina Lolobrigida were banned from Rome throughout the 1950s.

The Vicar, a play about Pope Pius XII's dealings with Nazi Germany, was banned as late as 1963. The pope is also known as the Vicar of Christ.

The presence of the Vatican and its ongoing influence in Italian politics is also believed to be partly the reason why Italy did not legalize divorce until 1974.

It took Italy's first non-Christian Democrat government for the Lateran pacts to be reformed in 1984 with John Paul II as a counterpart.

"After the agreement, things relaxed on both sides," said Filippo Gentiloni, author and history professor. Rome's "Tiber river became slightly narrower after it had grown wider for decades," said Gentiloni. The Tiber cuts across Rome, leaving the Vatican on one side and Italian government buildings on the other.

Tensions further eased as John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope in more than four centuries, quickly declared he had little interest in Italian politics, Gentiloni said.

Many Romans in fact adopted this pope, and posters bearing his face have been plastered throughout the capital since his death on Saturday.

"Rome mourns and thanks its pope," the posters declared.

"He was more a Roman pope than a Polish one," said Danilo Lelli, a 30-year-old street vendor.