Cesare Lombeoso was born in Verona, as an Austrian subject, on November 6, 1835, and was the second child in a family of five. His father Aron sprang from a Venetian mercantile family, whose origin can be traced back to a colony of North African Jews, expelled from Spain and settled in North Africa.
The name Lombroso or Lumbroso is a Spanish adjective in common use, denoting "clear" or "illuminating".
The formation of the Hapsburg Kingdom of Lombardy and Venice put an end for the time being to equality of civil rights for the Jews and Verona was one of the few towns of the district in which Jewish boys were allowed to attend the Gymnasium (public school), now removed from the control of the freethinkers, and handed over to that of the Jesuits.
When Lombroso's mother, Zefira Levi, married Aron Lombroso in the year 1830, she stipulated that her children must be brought up in a place in which it would be possible for them to attend the higher schools.
Aron's marriage with Zefira Levi, who belonged to a rich family engaged in the higher branch of industrial life, did not suffice to prevent the onset of poverty and the youth of the five children of the marriage was passed in narrow circumstances.
Inspired by Francis Galton's theories about natural born criminality and biological conditions, Lombroso argues that typical reasons for committing a crime don't depend on the socio-economic environmental components but rather on hereditary factors and/or neurological conditions therefore independent from individuals' own will.
Lombroso beliefs were mainly based on the thesis that "the born or atavistic uncultured offender", an individual that presents degenerative features in his physical build that differentiates him from a normal socially accepted man. In the pursuit of fame and in favour of his suspicious and anti-scientific thesis, Lombroso didn't hesitate to skin corpses, cut off and dissect heads, perform the most incredible and cruel operations on men who were believed criminals in order to measure parts of their skulls and bodies, outlining unbelievable theories about the physical features of the natural born criminal. His work was strongly influenced by physiognomy, developing a pseudo-science that dealt with forensic and psychosomatic phrenology inducing him to speculate like a wizard apprentice more than a scientist in a context based on eugenics and a precursory form of the scientific racism, whose consequences would be visible in the following decades during WWII and the advent of nazism. In fact these conjectures were adopted as the foundation of the theories of German doctors about the pureness of the Aryan race, extending Lomroso's false theory to the physical features of the Hebrew and the Rom and so on, justifying their extermination.
Historically the idea that criminality is connected to physical characteristic of a person was present in Iliad of Homer and in some medieval laws that state; when there are two suspects of a crime, the one most deformed must be considered guilty. Maybe it was therefore Lombroso became convinced that the physicality was the most powerful cause of criminality and, in his analysis, he considered the anatomical configuration of the skull a very important parameter. He found an element in the skull that he believed to be a degenerative character frequently occurring in the alienated and the offender. But in reality, from an anatomic point of view, it is a frequent characteristic in individuals and it doesn't have a scientific meaning.
Badly influenced by Darwin's theories, Lombroso came to support "the born offender's" atavistic characteristics, similar to those of animals and the primitive man: these characteristics make it difficult or even impossible to adapt to the modern society and push one again and again to commit offenses. Cesare Lombroso also delineates the legal consequences of his doctrine because "crime is not the result of free choice but rather of an organic disease". The sentence must not be understood as a punishment (because 'it makes no sense to punish those who did not act freely) but simply as a means of protecting society. He always strongly supported the need for the death penalty under the Italian legal system, believing that if the crime was because of his physical characteristics then any form of rehabilitation was not possible.
These bizarre theories were contested also by his pupils (one of all was Enrico Ferri - lecturer of criminal law in Bologna, Siena, Pisa and Rome), and nowadays nobody thinks these still have scientific value. The absurdity of Cesare Lombroso's theories was been ascertained for a long time by now and represent a valid reason to rethink the assignment of the street name to commemorate Cesare Lombroso.
The figure and work of Cesare Lombroso still represent a great vulnus for all Neapolitans and Sicilians, who one strongly offended by his activities. An offence that still now has consequence for majority of them.
After receiving his bachelor in Medicine at the University of Pavia in 1858, in 1859 Cesar Lombroso enlisted himself `in the Piemontese Military, into which he was invited in 1861, to Calabria as a "medical adviser" in the campaign of repression of brigantaggio.
In Napolitania, having an abundant fleet of humans at his disposition, the doctor began a deep and uncontrolled criminology study on Calabria's population hostile to the Piemontese invasion, looking for an improbable delinquent relationship between language - uses - ways of dressing and the physical characteristics of the residents. His theories took form and were applied without concern on poor peasants whose only guilt was having the measures of the skull similar to that of famous offenders of that period. Those were conjectures that, unfortunately, found fertile land in historical context and a military atmosphere very particular: for the army's leaders it appeared really providential to have found false scientific excuses to justify the bloody repression put into effect against populations unarmed and forced to defend themselves from an invasion with devastating effects.
In this way distortions were introduced to create a negative image of Neapolitans and Sicilians: Lombroso, far from being a rigorous scientist, as appeared later, was recruited to prove, on the false and absurd basis, that the southern people were offenders at birth. The doctor from Verona measures the size and shape of the skull of many rebels that were killed or deported from Napolitania and Sicily to Piemonte (caring military doctors sent him, for years, the body or at least the skull of "briganti" - who men and women killed in battle or died in jail - so that he could measure, dissect, study and then try to prove the theory of "the natural offender"), concluding that these atavistic traits related back to the "primitive man". In reality, it was one of the most brutal physical and psychological violence, deliberately put in place against the southern people, an event entirely unworthy of the alleged craftsman of the Italian Risorgimento, and indelible damage to all of humanity as a result of Lombroso's hatred towards Neapolitans and Sicilians.
Nowadays there are a Museum in Turin (Piedmont), dedicated to this freaking figure, and this museum are exposed lots of human rests of "Briganti", the last Neapolitan patriots.
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