Una nazione giovane: l’Italia dei palazzi municipali, 1861-1911 a cura di I. Balestreri e M. Folin
The importance of town halls in the public life and urban landscape of Italian cities has long been recognized as one of the hallmarks of our country’s cultural heritage. This awareness, however, has not been followed by systematic studies aimed at reconstructing the vicissitudes of this heritage as a whole, considering not only the most famous (and in some ways anomalous) cases, but also the many places and periods of Italian history that still remain little investigated.
This historiographical gap becomes particularly sensitive in the case of the post-unification period, when the municipal seats were called upon to house the governing bodies envisaged by the new state system, as well as to embody its values, making them tangible at the local level. Hence all the material and symbolic investment that the buildings built or renovated in the first fifty years after the Unification of Italy were subject to.