The 19th Century: the development of the prison system
Notorious criminals of the 20th Century
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The skull, the brain and the writings of Giovanni Passannante
Born in Salvia (today Savoia di Lucania) on 9 February 1849, Giovanni Passannante attempted to assassinate the king of Italy, Umberto I, in Naples on 17 November 1878, wounding him slightly. He was sentenced to death the following year but the Royal Decree of 29 March replaced capital punishment with hard labour for life. Passannante was sent to Portoferraio Prison on the island of Elba and as a result of the inhumane treatment he was subjected to, being forced to live in solitary confinement and permanent silence, he began to show signs of mental unbalance. After ten years of harsh imprisonment he was given a psychiatric examination by Professors Biffi and Tamburini who declared him of unsound mind, and ordered him to be sent to the criminal asylum of Montelupo Fiorentino, where he died on 4 February 1910.
An autopsy was performed on Passannante’s body and subsequently his brain and skull were sent to the Superior Institute of Police at Regina Coeli Prison, Rome. In 1936 they were sent to the Criminal Museum.
Passannante’s skull and brain, together with some of his writings, were displayed in the Criminal Museum in 1936, as “important evidence of criminal anthropological studies to ascertain the constitutional and biological traits of criminals”.
Passannante’s brain, skull and writings in the Criminology Museum are evidence of the outdated positivist position held by Lombroso which reduced everything that did not conform to the concept of normalcy to being pathological, by inventing many new classes of deviance and crime (born criminal, amoral, partially insane etc.) seeking the cause for these in the hidden recesses of the brain.
