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This belief conveniently justified his a priori assumption that southern Italians were racially inferior to northern Italians. He held that criminality is inherited, and carries with it inherited physical characteristics that can be measured with instruments like calipers and craniographs. Criminals, Lombroso wrote, were “born criminals”. Using precise measurements, Lombroso recorded further physical traits he found indicative of derangement, including an “asymmetric face”. Examining Villella’s remains, Lombroso found “evidence” confirming his belief: a depression on the occiput of the skull reminiscent of the skulls of “savages and apes”. Nearby lived a scientist and surgeon named Cesare Lombroso, who believed that brigantes were a primitive type of people, prone to crime. Villella’s death led to the birth of modern criminology.

Villella died in prison in Pavia, northern Italy, in 1864. The laborer, Giuseppe Villella, was reportedly convicted of being a brigante (bandit), at a time when brigandage - banditry and state insurrection - was seen as endemic.

In 1844, a laborer from a small town in southern Italy was put on trial for stealing “five ricottas, a hard cheese, two loaves of bread and two kid goats”. (Photo by Romano Cagnoni/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Introduction A couple viewing the head of Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso preserved in a jar of formalin at an exhibition in Bologna, 1978.

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