ROME  –  Gone are the days when the duties of an Italian princess involved nothing more than a bit of regal hand-waving and playing piano for guests. Legal recognition of the country’s nobility stopped in 1946 and for aristocrats such as Princess Giacinta Ruspoli, upkeep of the family’s ancestral homes doesn’t come cheap. So Giacinta and her mother, Princess Maria Pia, a former Miss Sicily, rent out Ruspoli Bonaparte Residence, a 16th-century palace in Rome, and greet the paying guests. A night in one of the property’s four suites — each measuring more than 1,000 square feet including several halls, ceiling-high stone fireplaces and marble decorations — starts at about $470, including butler service and breakfast. Guests also get an “entrance ticket” to another noble residence, the family’s Castello Ruspoli, a former hunting estate in a village 30 miles north of Rome, which has been recently renovated to create a 10-suite boutique hotel. “We consider ourselves as mere keepers” of the properties, says Giacinta. “Times have changed. My family wants to share all this beauty we have been gifted with everyone else.” We all know about leap years, when February 29 is added to help keep our calendars synchronized with the Earth’s orbit around the sun. Since the 1970s, leap seconds have also been doing the job of correcting the imbalance between astronomical time and the ultra precise atomic clocks that now set the global standard. This week, however, international timekeepers voted to scrap them and introduce the leap hour, the first of which might not happen for thousands of years. Our notion of standardized time is a modern construct, spurred by the advent of rail travel in the 19th century and the need for agreed-upon timetables.