Europe | Still sovereign

Meet the Knights of Malta

An ancient global order gathers in the Eternal City

Pope Francis receives in audience the Participants of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta
About the size of itImage: Alamy
|ROME (BUT NOT ITALY)

It was enough to captivate any conspiracy theorist: in the grounds of an 18th-century Roman villa more than 100 well-connected men and women from around the world—many of them aristocrats—came together to discuss their common mission. The meeting, from January 25th-27th, brought together the ambassadors of perhaps the oddest entity in international law, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “Still sovereign”

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