Between 1690 and 1693 Cardinal Benedetto Pamphilj (1653–1730) held the office of Cardinal-Legate of Bologna. Although he is well known as a patron of music in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Rome, his time in Bologna has received virtually no attention. This article provides an extensive overview of these years on the basis of a large body of previously unpublished documents. Three appendices provide transcriptions of 74 documents from the cardinal's financial administration, 44 excerpts from a Bolognese institutional diary and a chronology of events involving the cardinal.

For a set x, let ${\cal S}\left( x \right)$ be the set of all permutations of x. We prove in ZF (without the axiom of choice) several results concerning this notion, among which are the following:

(1) For all sets x such that ${\cal S}\left( x \right)$ is Dedekind infinite, $\left| {{{\cal S}_{{\rm{fin}}}}\left( x \right)} \right| < \left| {{\cal S}\left( x \right)} \right|$ and there are no finite-to-one functions from ${\cal S}\left( x \right)$ into ${{\cal S}_{{\rm{fin}}}}\left( x \right)$, where ${{\cal S}_{{\rm{fin}}}}\left( x \right)$ denotes the set of all permutations of x which move only finitely many elements.

(2) For all sets x such that ${\cal S}\left( x \right)$ is Dedekind infinite, $\left| {{\rm{seq}}\left( x \right)} \right| < \left| {{\cal S}\left( x \right)} \right|$ and there are no finite-to-one functions from ${\cal S}\left( x \right)$ into seq (x), where seq (x) denotes the set of all finite sequences of elements of x.

(3) For all infinite sets x such that there exists a permutation of x without fixed points, there are no finite-to-one functions from ${\cal S}\left( x \right)$ into x.

(4) For all sets x, $|{[x]^2}| < \left| {{\cal S}\left( x \right)} \right|$.

For a set x, let ${\cal S}\left( x \right)$ be the set of all permutations of x. We prove by the method of permutation models that the following statements are consistent with ZF:

(1) There is an infinite set x such that $|\wp \left( x \right)| < |{\cal S}\left( x \right)| < |se{q^{1 - 1}}\left( x \right)| < |seq\left( x \right)|$, where $\wp \left( x \right)$ is the power set of x, seq (x) is the set of all finite sequences of elements of x, and seq1-1 (x) is the set of all finite sequences of elements of x without repetition.

(2) There is a Dedekind infinite set x such that $|{\cal S}\left( x \right)| < |{[x]^3}|$ and such that there exists a surjection from x onto ${\cal S}\left( x \right)$.

(3) There is an infinite set x such that there is a finite-to-one function from ${\cal S}\left( x \right)$ into x.