Custom created_at attribute on a pivot Model - laravel

Question

Situation: I have a model (let's call it Pivot) who is declared as follows:
class Pivot extends Model
{
public $timestamps = false;
.....
}
It has 5 fields: id, notification_id, device_id, created_at, read_at.
This model is used as the pivot table between Notification and Device:
// Notification.php
public function devices()
{
return $this->belongsToMany(Device::class)
->withPivot(['id','created_at','notification_id','device_id', 'read_at']);
}
public function pivots() {
return $this->hasMany(Pivot::class);
}
And i did the same inside the Device class.
My MySQL has a timezone (Europe\Rome) different then UTC and i can't change it because it is already used by different projects.
PROBLEM: How to setup the created_at field to work properly?
I tried to use default timestamps, it works BUT it will also add the updated_at column and I can't have it (it would add too many redundancy).
So i set public $timestamps = false; and i created the field in the database like that:
$table->timestamp('created_at')->default(DB::raw('CURRENT_TIMESTAMP'));
The problem of this one is that, as said earlier, MySQL has a wrong timezone (Europe\Rome), so when I read data from this table the created_at value is shifted by 2 hours from the original. This is a problem when i also set the read_at property, because it creates situations where the notification is read before the creation.
The last idea i had was to set the created_at inside a creating event. I followed this laracast guide but, apparently, if the data is inserted as a pivot table from a sync method, events are not called (they didn't worked for me).
Do you have other ideas? of course there are some ugly hacks that could work (like iterating on the created Pivot and set them manually), but i would like to use a better solution.
EDIT: the solution proposed by #Maraboc worked perfectly. I set the timezone property of MySQL config array in config/database.php:
'mysql' => [
'driver' => 'mysql',
'host' => env('DB_HOST', '127.0.0.1'),
'port' => env('DB_PORT', '3306'),
'database' => env('DB_DATABASE', 'forge'),
'username' => env('DB_USERNAME', 'forge'),
'password' => env('DB_PASSWORD', ''),
'unix_socket' => env('DB_SOCKET', ''),
'charset' => 'utf8mb4',
'collation' => 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci',
'prefix' => '',
'strict' => true,
'engine' => null,
'timezone' => '+00:00',
],

Answer 1

Use model events to set the timestamp when you are creating the model. You can set the field and timezone together.
class Pivot extends Model
{
public $timestamps = false;
protected static function boot()
{
static::creating(function($model) {
$model->create_at = Carbon::now('Europe\Rome');
});
parent::boot();
}
}
Don't forget the parent::boot() or else no traits will get booted on the model.