The highly non-trivial structure of the $\theta$--vacuum encodes many of the fundamental properties of gauge theories. In particular, the response of the vacuum to the $\theta$--term perturbation is sensitive to the existence of confinement, chiral symmetry breaking, etc. We analyze the dependence of the vacuum energy density on theta around two special values, $\theta=0$ and $\theta=\pi$. The existence or not of singular behaviors associated to spontaneous breaking of CP symmetry in these vacua has been a controversial matter for years. We clarify this important problem by means of continuum non-perturbative techniques. The results show the absence of first order cusp singularities on the vacuum energy density at $\theta=0$ and $\theta=\pi$ for some gauge theories. This smooth dependence of the energy on $\theta$ might have implications for long standing cosmological problems like the baryonic asymmetry and the cosmological constant problem.

Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure. Invited talk at "Renormalization Group and Anomalies in Gravity and Cosmology", Ouro Preto,Brazil, March 17-23, 2003.v2: Added references