Nearby radio loud AGN and the Unified Model

Abstract

The statistical study of the parsec scale properties of radio sources is crucial to get information on the nature of the central engine and to provide the foundations of the current unified theories, suggesting that the appearance of active galactic nuclei depends strongly on orientation. We started a project to observe at sub-arcsec resolution a complete sample of 94 nearby (z<0.1) radio galaxies, the Bologna Complete Sample, which is not affected by any selection effect on the jet velocity and orientation with respect to the line of sight. Up to now, we published our parsec scale analysis of 77/94 sources. Here, we describe the last VLBA observations at 5 GHz and EVN data at 18 cm obtained for the 17 remaining faintest radio core (<5 mJy at 5 GHz in VLA images) BCS sources and we report our preliminary results on the whole complete sample.