Since 1990, the museum has been housed on the ground floor of Casa Carducci, where it is currently located. The exhibition path develops through five rooms, starting from the Napoleonic period up to the First World War. The displayed material constitutes a rather limited selection of the rich museum heritage. Particular attention is dedicated to the history of the city of Bologna during the Risorgimento period. On display are uniforms, weapons, clothing, flags, paintings (among others, works by Muzzi and Ademollo), “patriotic” objects in general but also prints, newspapers, and posters.
The museum was inaugurated in 1893. Located in a room on the ground floor of the Civic Museum, it offered a very careful setup, also from a scenographic point of view, with walls adorned by the coats of arms of the cities of the region and busts of the great protagonists of the Italian Risorgimento. In the display cases were exhibited documents, memorabilia, medals: a large amount of material whose collection had already begun ten years before the museum’s opening, during the National Exhibition of Turin (1884), within which a pavilion on the Italian Risorgimento was set up. Other materials were added to this core in 1888, the year of the Celebrations for the 8th Centennial of the University and the Emilian Exhibition in Bologna. In this context, the “Temple of the Risorgimento” was set up at San Michele in Bosco.
The success of the exhibition was such that the City Council decided to establish the Museum of the Risorgimento. The museum, closed to the public during the Second World War, was reopened in 1954 under the new name “Civic Museum of the First and Second Risorgimento,” to connect the Risorgimento with the Resistance. In the following decades, the exhibition has undergone alternating fortunes with various rearrangements and periods of closure.
