ABSTRACT
In December 1866 Bologna’s councillor Ercolani made a recommendation to the local administration, that the “municipal clocks should be adjusted to the Mean Time of Rome.”2 However, after Unifi cation the cities did not simply have to synchronise their clocks. They had also to defi ne and to negotiate their relationship as cities to the nation. Bologna claimed a prominent place in the young nation-state and within the history of the Risorgimento. According to its mayor Gaetano Tacconi, “the Unifi cation [of Italy] came into being the day that Vittorio Emanuele offi cially accepted the annexation of the Papal provinces.”3 In this perspective the liberation of the Legations from the Papal regime appears as the key to Unifi cation and the point of departure for redefi ning Bologna’s municipal identity, a historically strong but, during most of the nineteenth century, a politically suppressed identity.
