The 19th Century: the development of the prison system
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Plaster cast of the skull of the Calabrian brigand Giuseppe Villella
Giuseppe Villella, born in Motta di S. Lucia in the Catanzaro area, sixty-nine years old, suspected of brigandage and sentenced three times for theft and arson, was examined by Cesare
Lombroso during a visit he paid to the penitentiary in which Villella was held. After he died in prison in November 1872, Lombroso performed an autopsy on his body. The anatomical examination of Villella’s skull revealed a cranial anomaly that Lombroso described as a “median occipital fossette, a space normally occupied by the occipital crest”. Here is how Lombroso, many years after his discovery of the fossette, remembers the way he felt at the time: “The sight of that fossette suddenly appeared to me like a broad plain beneath an infinite horizon, the nature of the criminal was illuminated, he must have reproduced in our day the traits of primitive man going back as far as the carnivores.” (1906)
Provenance: Rome, Prof. Ruggero Romanese, director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine, 1934
