Museo Civico del Risorgimento

Bologna's Risorgimento Civic Museum, founded in 1893 and housed since 1990 beneath the poet Carducci's former home, documents the city from the French arrival of 1796 to the aftermath of the First World War.

Why it matters

Bologna's nineteenth century was turbulent: Jacobin clubs, Austrian returns, the popular uprising of 8 August 1848, and finally the new Italy. The museum presents that sequence through relics, weapons, flags and paintings, treating the Risorgimento as social, economic and political history as well as a military story. Its association with Casa Carducci, the Nobel laureate's former apartment above, reflects Bologna's public conscience between revolution and the Great War.

What to notice

• Antonio Muzzi's large canvas of the expulsion of the Austrians from Bologna on 8 August 1848, the city's proudest insurrectionary day, still marked on every facade plaque along the ring streets.
• One of the finest known portraits of Giuseppe Garibaldi, displayed beside a cap that belonged to him, and — in the museum's rooms — the armchair in which the general sat convalescent after his wound at Aspromonte.
• Uniforms, flags and weapons of the papal and national forces, including the standard of the Bologna National Guard, material evidence of the armed passages between restorations and independence.
• The philatelic and postal-history section dedicated to the collector Giorgio Tabarroni, spanning the old Italian states: a reminder that unification was also a story of tariffs, stamps and administration.
• The building itself: the ground floor of Casa Carducci, whose first floor preserves the poet's apartment and library exactly as he left them.

Context and history

A permanent museum was what the city council voted for once the 1884 national show in Turin and the "Tempio del Risorgimento" triumph at the 1888 Emilian Exhibition in Bologna had demonstrated the appetite of the 1880s patriotic-exhibition circuit; the institution was inaugurated on 12 June 1893 in a ground-floor room of the then Museo Civico, its cases filled largely by donations from veterans' families. Through the twentieth century it absorbed documents of the First World War, was closed in the later war years, reopened in 1954 with an extended narrative that included the Resistance, closed again, and reopened in 1975 with a didactic layout.

Since 1990 it has occupied the ground floor of Casa Carducci on Piazza Carducci, the sixteenth-century house where Giosuè Carducci lived from 1890 until his death in 1907, recovering its original name and the 1796-1918 span. The same institution curates the historic areas of the Certosa cemetery, extending its work to Bologna's wider civic memory.