University museum · Criminology and anthropology · Turin, Piedmont

Cesare Lombroso Museum of Criminal Anthropology

The Cesare Lombroso Museum of Criminal Anthropology at the University of Turin preserves the collection assembled by Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), the Italian physician and criminologist who founded the positivist school of criminal anthropology. The museum houses skulls, skeletons, brains, photographs, and objects collected by Lombroso in his attempt to identify biological markers of criminal behaviour — a scientific programme now thoroughly discredited but of profound historical importance in understanding the intellectual history of the social sciences, racial science, and the treatment of marginality in modern Europe.

At a glance

Type: University museum of criminal anthropology and history of science
Period: Collection assembled late 19th century; museum established and reopened to the public 2009
Style: Positivist scientific collection in a historic university building
Location: University of Turin, Turin, Piedmont, Italy
Coordinates: 45.0497° N, 7.6798° E

Overview

The Lombroso Museum is one of the most controversial and debated university museums in Italy, housing a collection that documents both Lombroso’s scientific ambitions and the ideological frameworks that shaped nineteenth-century European thinking about crime, race, and social control. Lombroso believed that criminals could be identified by physical characteristics — cranial measurements, facial features, body proportions — a theory he called “born criminal” (reo nato). The museum presents this collection critically, contextualising it within the history of science and the broader history of colonial and racial thought.

History

Cesare Lombroso was an Italian eugenicist, criminologist, phrenologist, and physician who is considered the founder of modern criminology for his influence on Western notions of individual criminal responsibility, even as his specific biological theories have been entirely rejected. He assembled his collection at the University of Turin over decades of work as a professor of forensic medicine and criminal anthropology, accumulating thousands of specimens from prisoners, the mentally ill, and subjects from colonised populations. Following his death in 1909, his skull and brain were added to the collection per his own instructions. The museum was reopened in a critically redesigned form in 2009 after a period of closure and reflection on how to display such a collection responsibly.

What you see

The museum displays Lombroso’s collection of human skulls and skeletons, preserved brains, plaster face casts, photographs, weapons confiscated from prisoners, artworks made by inmates, and the tools of nineteenth-century forensic science. Lombroso’s own skeleton and skull are present in the collection. Interpretive panels throughout the exhibition place the collection in its historical context, critically examining the pseudoscientific premises of criminal anthropology and their connections to colonialism, racism, and institutional violence. The overall effect is at once historically illuminating and ethically charged.

Cultural significance

The Lombroso Museum functions as an important site of critical heritage, where the history of science intersects with the history of discrimination and state violence. Its collection is primary source material for historians of criminology, medicine, race, and the Risorgimento era, and its contested nature — subject to repatriation claims and ongoing ethical debate — makes it one of the most discussed museum cases in contemporary Italian cultural policy.

Practical information

Address: Via Pietro Giuria 15, 10126 Turin TO, Italy (University of Turin)
Opening hours: Check official website for current schedule; closed certain public holidays
Admission: Ticketed; discounts for students and researchers
Website: Check University of Turin Museum System for current information

Getting there

The museum is located on the University of Turin campus in the central Crocetta district. From Turin Porta Nuova station, take the metro Line 1 to Re Umberto or walk approximately 20 minutes. By tram, lines 4 and 10 serve the area. Turin is connected by high-speed rail to Milan (approximately 55 minutes) and by regular services to Genoa and the rest of the national network. Turin Caselle Airport lies approximately 16 km north and is served by shuttle to the city centre.

Sources & resources

Find it on the map

Google Maps See the location on a full map → Street View Walk around the place virtually → OpenStreetMap Free community cartography →

Historical events at this place (1)

2020 Museo di Antropologia Criminale: visita Guidata

The Museum of Criminal Anthropology is a museum founded in 1876 in Turin by the physician and anthropologist Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) and exhibits the collections collected mainly for the studies of Cesare Lombroso in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, composed of preparations anatomicals, drawings, photographs, bodies of crime, artisanal and artistic productions, including valuable ones, made by inmates in asylums and prisons.



The exhibition is part of the museum system of the University of Turin.



The Museum of Criminal Psychiatry and Anthropology was officially inaugurated in 1898, starting from the private collection gathered by Cesare Lombroso during his life.



As Lombroso himself writes: &ldquo;The first nucleus of the collection began in the army, where, in addition to measuring thousands of soldiers craniologically, I had carefully preserved the skulls and brains of the dead; this collection gradually grew, with the stripping of the old Sardinian, Valtellinesi, Lucchesi, Piedmontese burial grounds, made by me and my friends from Turin and Pavia. Not a day went by before in Pavia first, in Pesaro and then in Turin I did not try to increase the collection with the skulls of the insane and criminals who died in asylums and prisons &quot;.



The collection was opened to the public for the first time in 1884, on the occasion of the anthropology exhibition organized in the general exhibition of Turin, but it was only in 1892 that the Faculty of Medicine of the Savoy University announced the decision to establish a museum of psychiatry and criminology, but without yet electing the Lombrosian collection to that rank. This despite Arturo Graf, rector of the university at the time, described it as &quot;the first criminal museum in Europe&quot;.



Similar collections of artifacts and materials related to madness and crime were springing up throughout the kingdom, for example the exhibition of Lorenzo Tenchini&#39;s waxwork death masks of 1885 in Padua, the book published in 1894 by Angelucci and Pieraccini on the artifacts made by internships and the collection of anatomical finds put together in Naples in the same year by Pasquale Penta, the first holder in Italy of a chair of criminal anthropology. Finally, during the first international congress of criminal anthropology held in Rome in 1885, Giuseppe Sergi launched the proposal for a national museum of criminal anthropology. All this thanks also to the Zanardelli Code of 1889, which provided for the possibility of taking anatomical parts from the cadavers of prisoners for the purposes of scientific research.



The Lombrosian collection was transferred in 1896 to the premises of the building of the anatomical institutes. Here the first real opening to the public took place, in May 1906, thanks to Mario Carrara, Lombroso&#39;s son-in-law. A significant increase in the number of finds was the consequence of a 1909 circular issued by the then Minister of Grace and Justice Orlando, who ordered that all the bodies of the crime preserved in the chancelleries of the kingdom and destined for destruction were transferred to the Lombrosian museum. with the aim of increasing &quot;a kind of experimental collection, which lends light and aid to the research of scholars in the world of crime&quot;.



Lombroso never saw the inauguration of the museum, because he died in 1909 donating his body to science, as Carlo Giacomini had already done before him - whose skeleton is kept in the Museum of Anatomy which is located in the same building.



The direction of the museum then passed to Mario Carrara, who expanded the collection especially in the part relating to forensic medicine.



In 1932, however, Carrara was expelled from the university and deprived of his professorships and the direction of the museum, as a consequence of his refusal of the Oath of allegiance to fascism.



The museum itself was closed, and positivist theories rejected as unable to base criminal law on the concept of race.



Despite the apparent intention to move the entire collection to Rome, the museum remained in Turin, and in 1947 it was transferred to the institute of forensic medicine.



The collection remained in a state of neglect due to lack of funds for decades, until 1985, when the exhibition Science and guilt was set up at the Mole Antonelliana in Turin.



Criminal crimes criminologists: a face of the nineteenth century, which totaled about 120,000 visitors, bringing the public&#39;s attention back to the Lombrosian museum.



Thus was born the idea of signing an Appeal for the Lombroso Museum, signed by various intellectuals and scholars from various Italian cities, addressed to Piedmontese administrators and the university, for the safeguarding of the Lombrosian heritage.



And while individual exhibits began to be requested for exhibitions also abroad, the idea of ??a rearrangement took shape.



In 2009 the collection found its new headquarters at the Palazzo degli Istituti Anatomici in via Pietro Giuria (Torino) , in a permanent setting open to the public.

https://culturalheritageonline.com/places/cesare-lombroso-museum-of-criminal-anthropology-l3132/

#CulturalHeritage #CHO