Prisoner of the Vatican: The Popes' Secret Plot to Capture Rome from the New Italian State

David Kertzer is a historian and anthropologist whose Prisoner of the Vatican, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2004, reconstructs the decades after Italian unification took Rome from the papacy in 1870, when successive popes refused to recognise the new Italian state and periodic secret plots aimed to restore papal temporal power. Kertzer works from Vatican and Italian government archives, including material opened only in the twentieth century, and the book followed his earlier prize winning work on the same period, giving it a track record of archival grounding. Its strength is that grounding and its narrative access to a period usually treated only in institutional church histories. Its limit is that it is a popular history aimed at a general readership rather than a specialist monograph with full scholarly apparatus, so a claim needing precise archival citation should be checked against Kertzer's endnotes or the specialist literature he draws on.