ABSTRACT
The growth of municipal technical offices in nineteenth-century Turin was closely linked with the emergence of new functions and powers of the city's local administration. The development of Turin's local bureaucracy followed a different chronology, less influenced by national political events than might be assumed. From the early 1850s until the early 1880s, Turin's technical bureaucracy was in fact organized around the personal skills and power of one man; chief engineer Edoardo Pecco, who replaced the previous municipal engineer in 1852. It was only after their promulgation that Turin's city council could gradually free itself from a somewhat secondary role in the government of urban affairs. When the city's Ufficio d'arte was created in 1843 as a municipal technical office in charge of the layout and maintenance of the city's streets, sewers, canals and buildings. Unique among them, the Ufficio d'Arte was, however, put under the control of both an assessore and the mayor.
