Cesare Lombroso Museum of Criminal Anthropology

About this place

In a glass case at the entrance to one of the rooms stands a man's skeleton. It belongs to Cesare Lombroso himself, the doctor who spent his life collecting skulls and death masks to prove that criminality could be read in the shape of a face and the size of a cranium. He left instructions that his own body be dissected and displayed among his specimens, and he largely got his wish: he is now exhibit number one in a museum that states plainly that his theory was wrong from the ground up. His head, preserved in formalin, is in the collection too, but the museum keeps it out of public view. The idea Lombroso built his 19th-century fame on, the 'born criminal' recognisable by his features, is not merely outdated science. It is pseudoscience with an openly racist foundation, used first to classify the poor of southern Italy and then whole peoples as lesser and closer to the primitive. Everything on show here — hundreds of skulls, faces cast in plaster after execution, human remains, letters and drawings and objects made by inmates of prisons and asylums — was gathered as evidence for that idea. Since reopening in 2009 the museum has presented the collection not as an achievement but as an indictment: the wall texts take the method apart and show how science bends and serves power when it goes looking for what it has already decided to find. Even the ownership of some of these remains has gone to court. The Calabrian town of Motta Santa Lucia sued for the return of the skull of one of its sons, the very skull Lombroso claimed had revealed his theory to him; a lower court ordered it returned in 2012, and in 2017 an appeals court ruled that it could stay in Turin. The museum is small and rarely takes more than an hour. It occupies a wing of the Palazzo degli Istituti Anatomici in San Salvario, a quarter of an hour on foot from Porta Nuova station and on the edge of Parco del Valentino, which has its own page here. Two other museums share the building, the Museum of Human Anatomy and the Fruit Museum, and a single 10-euro ticket covers all three; Lombroso alone is 5 euros. Entry is free for everyone every Wednesday and free with the Torino+Piemonte Card, and individual visitors need no advance booking. San Salvario is also one of Turin's most mixed neighbourhoods, with Middle Eastern and halal places nearby that solve the question of lunch afterwards. We will not dress this up: it is a hard visit. The remains are real people, none of whom consented to being displayed, some of what you see stays with you for days, and it is no place to bring children. If Turin is a single day on a trip coming down from Milan or the lakes, skip this without regret and spend the time on the Museo Egizio or the Mole Antonelliana. But if you have three days or more in the city and you are drawn to questions about science, racism and how an illusion gets dressed in the sober language of research, this will be one of the most thought-provoking hours you spend in Turin.