Turin, Italy Post #1

Hello everyone, my name is Ruth and after 2 planes, 2 trains, and about 2 days of traveling, I finally made it to my apartment in Turin, Italy! This city is so gorgeous, as is the countryside I saw pass by in the trains, and my apartment comes with a great view. Italy is everything I imagined and more, from the cobblestone streets to the brightly colored buildings. Turin feels like an adorable little Italian town you see in the movies, and I absolutely love it (even though I'm still getting used to not understanding any of the street signs and ordering food in Italian)!

On the train to Turin!

A random really pretty street!

Another really cute street!

 The view from my window!

In my next couple of days in Turin I am going to explore museums dedicated to the study of human anatomy and criminal anthropology. These museums will touch on topics that are now thought to be more ethnically fraught: this includes phrenology, craniometry, anatomy, and criminology. I am interested in how these museums choose to discuss these topics, seeing as they were once the sights of a lot of the major discoveries from these disciplines. This is especially true of the work from Cesare Lombroso.

Lombroso was a ‘positivist’ criminologist, meaning he believed that criminals are born as such due to evolutionary mishaps; these people, therefore, needed to be selected against and he used 'science' to prove that this was true. However, the scientific methods he used were clouded by prejudice and therefore, were later proven false.

He lived in Italy from 1835-1909. He received his medical degree in 1858, became a volunteer military doctor in 1859, and was appointed as a professor of forensic medicine and public hygiene in 1876. He then transitioned into a professor of psychiatry in 1896 and then of criminal anthropology in 1906.

I think this continual change of professorship goes to show the contradictory and ever-changing views that Lombroso had throughout his life. However, what he is most known for and remembered for is his theory of atavism. Atavism, which is atavist, from the Latin atavus, or ancestor, was the belief that criminality was inherited and therefore needed to be selected against. This has now known as a pseudoscience, but throughout his time he used this theory to support the death penalty and other preventative measures. The Italian government even used his scientific theory to screen for and imprison potential criminals before they had committed a crime.

These preventative measures highlighted above were central to his work, but Lombroso is a difficult individual to understand. He held many progressive social beliefs early in his career such as that he didn’t believe repression would bring about long term order, rather drainage, irrigation, schooling, etc. for the poor would and is quoted saying things like, “the aristocracy, like the criminal population, was anathema to the interests of a modern rationalist state.”

With that background in mind, I decided that my first stop in Turin had to be the “Cesare Lombroso” Museum of Criminal Anthropology. This museum is dedicated to the life and the work of Cesare Lombroso. I decided to spend the first day exploring the museum on my own, without a guide, to see how I personally interpreted the museum and its displays.

 The entrance to the museum

As soon as you walk in, the museum had an atrium introducing you to Lombroso and had a sign that highlighted the stated intention of the museum. It says it will take you to the second half of the 19^th century and tackle a series of questions — who is a criminal? who is a genius? should we value genetics or environmental influences? — all of which are still important and controversial questions to this day.

 “Many of the ideas of Cesare Lombroso‘s studies are out of date. Other survive under different forms,” the sign states. This is the first indication I get that part of the goal of this museum will be not only to shed light on Lombroso’s past, but also to salvage some of it.

“The museum teaches that caution is needed in interpreting the results of science. Truth and error co-exist, in every epoch,” the sign continues. Again, while this statement does allude to the fact that many of Lombroso’s findings were errors clouded by prejudices, it qualifies this statement by saying that it was an effect of the norms of the time period, rather than a mistake by Lombroso himself — which is an argument that does have its merits, but also (regardless of how it was intended to come across) I went into the next room feeling like the statement mitigated the harmful effect of Lombroso’s findings, right at the beginning of the museum.

[Disclaimer: All the pictures for the rest of this post are coming from online because the museum would not allow me to take pictures; I think this is probably out of respect to the human anatomy pieces on display]

The first display in the museum is a video located in a dimly lit room with dark, wooden benches. The video takes you back to Turin 1911 to give you an introduction to what is going on at that time. I think this is an interesting and interactive way to contextualize the time period. However, this also felt like another way to show the audience that it wasn’t just Lombroso that was prejudiced during this time period, there were a lot of people that thought the way he did — it was just the norm.

The conversation in the video is in Italian but there are placards that have an English translation. In this display, a younger Italian man and an older Italian man argue about the progress of Italy. They young one thinks they are on the right track but the older one is skeptical of Italy’s true progress and continually refers back to Lombroso’s warnings about criminals and the mentally ill — maybe indicating a shift at this time away from Lombroso’s findings.

I was surprised that this first video did not do anything to address the prejudiced nature of a lot of Lombroso’s findings, but rather simply contextualize his work with the unpredictable and precarious nature of the time, but we will see if that changes throughout the museum.

In that same room there is a timeline of Cesare Lombroso’s work. Again, it seems that contextualization is important to the curator, because at each time stamp along the timeline, there is a description of a significant event that occurred that year — events like the Second War of Italian Independence — before stating that year's significance to Lombroso.

The next room contains a display called “Measure, Measure.” And, as you might guess, this room is filled with instruments that Lombroso used for measurements ranging from the strength of one’s muscle to the size of one’s skull. On the text displayed in the room, it stresses the importance of precise measurements to Lombroso. This was the foundation of his work, he was “obsessed” with them. [However, later in the museum, a sign does mention that the inaccuracy in his findings may have been due to a large amount of trust placed into machines that were not as accurate as expected.]

An example of a device on display was a “craniograph.” This device was used to create 2-dimensional profiles of 3-dimensional skulls.

This looks to be the exact craniograph from the museum. Photo credit linked here.

The next room leads to the central hall of this exhibit and it is supposed to be a historical reconstruction of Lombroso’s original museum and contains his most essential “tools”: his collection of skeletons and plastered/wax body parts.

As you walk into the room, however, the first skeleton you see is Lombroso’s own. He left both his skeleton and his brain to the museum. Beside his remains, his will is also displayed, with what I found to be a striking last sentence: “I beg my loved ones not to grieve because I happily abandon life at a time in which being Italian virtually arouses shame”

This is Lombroso's skeleton. Photo credit linked here.

In the same entrance is one of the only texts that addresses the massive number of skeletons and skulls in the room and why they are on display. “For him, they were research materials: he did not think about creating a museum for the public. That is why you will see a selection not of single significant ‘piece’ but rather an accumulation of serial ‘pieces’ useful to make statistical evaluations,” the sign states. [However, the next room does just that, but we’ll get to that later]

If I’m being honest, this room was truly terrifying when I first walked in. Hundreds and hundreds of skulls just lined the walls. No descriptors, no indication of who these people once were. If there was an indicator, it didn’t have their name, but rather the crime that they had committed. Some were encased in a glass so clear that it almost felt that there was nothing protecting the remains; that you could reach out and grab it if you wanted to.

A close up image of the skulls. Photo credit linked here.

In this part of the exhibit I came to realize that hundreds upon hundreds of skulls on display, also meant hundreds and hundreds of lives. Double that of mothers and fathers, of siblings. To me, the fact that they also committed crimes, doesn’t also mean that they have lost the right to a burial and are now simply an object to be put on display.

And then I remember that on one of the only text displays in this part of the museum said that the reason they are on display is because they were essential to Lombroso’s research. And yet again, the same question keeps coming to me: why does that mean that they are allowed to be displayed?

Right behind the largest row of skulls is an equally enormous display of his collection of weapons used by criminals. It seemed to me almost as a reminder that the people whose skulls are on display here did commit crimes and they did do atrocious things. I don’t quite know if they were put there as a reminder, but their closeness in proximity didn’t feel like a coincidence.

However, an alternative way of thinking about this display is that they may have been trying to separate these forms of his work as much as possible. Because of the way the display is shaped, when you look at the weapons, you can’t see the anatomy; almost like they’re trying to push that part of his work away and let you focus on the less problematic part of the display, the weapons.

[An Aside: One of the most fascinating weapons was one that was shaped as a wooden cross depicting the Crucifix but was actually a knife. It just blew my mind how anyone could think to disguise a knife like that.]

I sat in this room for a while, somewhat frozen, reading the text that was on display, most not having to do with the skulls in the room, but rather some of Lombroso’s other findings, such as a display about his belief that tattoos were an indication of a predisposition to criminality and a display on some of his earlier work in social medicine.

[An aside, but interestingly enough, his research on pellagra found that spoiled maize was the cause of this disease, although the sign admits he was ignoring unfavorable evidence. It was later found that it was rather a need for a more balanced diet that caused it. This, to me, is an example from early in his career that he worked to make the data fit the hypothesis rather than changing the conclusion and that could be another reason that he was so quick to let his prejudices cloud his judgement in his later theories of atavism.]

As I was sitting on a bench in this museum, both to my right and my left were cases of hundreds of human skulls, and I couldn’t shake the chills and the eeriness of this moment, doubled by the fact that there were almost no other people present in this museum on this random afternoon in August.

I think that without much text surrounding this particular display, you are allowed to take in the magnitude of what you are viewing. You are allowed to simply observe what you are seeing, without all the noise of the text and the videos and the interactive infographics.

However, what they did choose to add to the display, which I found to be exceptionally interesting, was that they chose to display a recent set of photographs from an art project called “Face to Face: art against prejudice” (added to the museum in 2015). Along the top of the walls of this room, close to the ceiling, they had hung Lombroso’s drawings of criminals, a mixture of slight side profiles and direct shots.

This project did a similar thing, but with photographs. I quote their mission below.

“The photographs exhibited are the result of visual research inside the two jails and on the materials of the Museum. Almost to ideally enrich Lombroso’s collection of photographs, these images that portrait men and women, both convicts [and] free, have been taken on a white background in order to recreate the original setting of some of the photographs of the Museum’s archive. The project Face to Face assigns to these photographs its message against prejudice. Observing these portraits nobody can know “who is who” and he or she will be forced to make an effort to re-think and re-examine their own way of ‘looking’ at the world.”

This is the main center glass case in this large hall. Today, it looks very similar to this picture, but the "Face to Face" has large photographs all along the top of this case. Photo credit linked here.

On top of the glass encasing the skulls and the wax faces, were close up photographs of Italian men and women. They were all taken the exact same way and with the same background. The exhibition asks you then to identify which of the photographed are criminals

Lombroso’s work juxtaposed with this new art display was a fascinating way to critique his work, without adding too much noise. I think this may have been the museum’s way of showing Lombroso’s prejudice, without explicitly stating it (although they do mention it in other parts of the museum).

This next section focuses on a specific skull that began his theories on criminality. It’s named “1870: The Revelation” and it houses the skull of Giuseppe Villella. Through re-examining this skull, Lombroso “noticed that the median occipital fossa, which accommodates part of the cerebellum, was larger than normal. Since this character appears in lemurs and other mammals, he deduced that primitive characters had re-appeared in Villella, the primary cause of his criminal behavior.”

Once again, this was later proven to be false, but you have to search for the end of the text box, until it explicitly states the problematic nature of this piece of work. It does not mention that this “discovery” led to the systematic exclusion of criminals — before they had even committed crimes — as a preventative measure by the government. It does not mention the prejudiced nature of his “finding” and how it was used to justify a racial hierarchy. [Again, there are other points in the museum that do somewhat address these concerns, but I felt that this needed to be more explicitly stated in this section because of the problematic nature of this specific finding.]

The next part takes you through art pieces created by individuals in asylums in the late nineteenth century. First is the clothes of G. Versino, which he created by tying together old mops. In total, it weighed over 40 kilos and he wore it every single day. Other pieces included a box filled with what looked like a thousand paper cranes and a cardboard model of a bed with restraining fixtures (ones that were probably used on inmates). There were also a number of clay figures.

One striking piece of art was an intricate wooden piece of furniture. Lombroso collected these art pieces because he thought that people who were mentally ill ("insane" as he put it) would produce art of with analogies to “more primitive civilizations.” When looking at this piece of furniture, however, it is hard to imagine how Lombroso would have been able to justify that this could have been created without immense attention to detail, precision, and skill.

I think his obsession with collecting art from his patients is explained best by this statement displayed next to these images.

“For Lombroso, the “rather mad” person and especially the “lunatic” were the intermediate links between genius and insanity. This explains Lombroso’s interest in the artistic expressions of mentally disabled persons: if the rather mad person preserves the appearance of genius, albeit deprived of substance, the lunatic will connect is to the substance, albeit formally inadequate substance, of genius. Moreover, because of his proximity to the “primitive” world, the lunatic can transmit to us, via atavism, the first signs of an expressive culture,” a sign in the museum states.

This next room had more items created by prisoners, rather than the mentally ill. Items included more clay figures, Along the top of the wall there are also more images of criminals. The most interesting part of this room, however, was the engraved water pitchers that filled most of the displays in this part of the museum. Not only were they on display, but there was a 3-D interactive screen that would let you choose a water pitcher so you could see the full engravings on all sides of the object. Some of these water pitchers had obscene images. Others had images of suicidal intentions.

I think it is also important to note that, like the human anatomy in the previous room, there is no information about who made these pieces or where they came from. 

For Lombroso, the analogies he found between the objects made by the “insane” and by the prisoners confirmed the connection between the two types of “deviance.”

The next room has model of Philadelphia State Penitentiary gifted to him by the architect, but along with other 'positives' he attempted to propose punishments alternative to detention. Like I said before, he was an avid proponent of the death penalty.

The second to last part of the exhibit was definitely the most striking. This room was an exact replica of his study, complete with a replica of his most “important” skull, Giuseppe Villella (who was mentioned earlier) and a large painting of Lombroso himself, commissioned by his children after his death.

 Lombroso's replica study. Credit linked here.

However, the most striking part about this section was the voiceover in Italian that filled the room (English translation on placards). At first, I was confused (partially because it was in Italian and I couldn't find the translation), but soon enough I realized, the voice I'm hearing is supposed to be Lombroso. In this audio, he is apologetic and reflective over his past mistakes. 

I found this to be one of the most unsettling parts of the museum. There is no way to know what Lombroso would think about his findings today, however contextualizing his views has been a prevalent part of this entire museum. Earlier, they implied that his views were prejudiced because of the norms of the time period. And here, it seems to be implying that in the context of today's norms, he would be apologetic about his views, and while that may be true, I did not find that it was productive to have a voiceover of Lombroso being apologetic about his views, rather than having an audio clip that owned up to and explained his views and the disastrous effects that they had.

The museum ends with a hallway that summarizes views on certain topics, including his thoughts on race, women and feminism, and his brief period of belief in spiritism. The first sign you see begins with a reflection about how we are still asking the same questions, and while we may now have different ways of answering them, Lombroso was the first to pose these important questions — very similar to the reflection in the room before.

This room is where I found the most explicit statements of the many problematic and prejudiced views that he had. However, each statement that did address a problematic view was followed by another sentence that tried to explain his views. I cite some examples below.

On the subject of criminality: “Nevertheless, greater awareness of the relationship between individual responsibility and societal responsibility urges prevention rather than rehabilitation, while we can recognize a positive inheritance of Lombroso’s thinking in the modulation of punishment according to the convict’s behavior.”

On the subject of race: “ He believed that black skin represented a link between the apes and the white man…this established the hierarchy of “human races with the white man at the top.” It goes onto say “Although undeniable, Lombroso’s ‘racist outlook’ had many nuances, and even his most disgraceful aspects must be placed in the context of the common beliefs, culture, and prejudices of his time.”

On the subject of women: “He acknowledged women’s autonomy, rights, and dignity, that usually were denied then, admitting that many female limitations were the result of centuries of social and cultural alienation.” It goes on to say that, however, “he could not overcome the strong prejudices of the time in terms of the hierarchy of the sexes.”

Overall, I walked away from the museum feeling that it was a bit like a shrine to Lombroso and his work: from the exact replica of his study to the continual reminders of the importance of his work.

Lombroso was a complicated man that had many contradicting view-points. How one is able to transition from a social reformist who advocated for better irrigation, schooling, and drainage for the poor to one that wanted to “freeze” evolution and “isolate” the features of “inherited backwardness,” I still do not quite understand, although it seems to me that the museum is attributing it to the norms of the time period.

Furthermore, although I do understand the importance of contextualizing his work and remembering the importance of the new questions he raised, I think it is harmful to phrase these statements in such a way that implies the good must be remembered in spite of the bad. I think a more productive conversation could occur with “and” statements as opposed to “but” statements.

To me, there is an immense difference between, “Lombroso had prejudiced views, but raised important questions that remain unanswered,” versus “Lombroso raised important questions that remain unanswered and he also had problematic views.” The former seems to try to justify, while the latter firmly acknowledges the wrongdoings. 

In the coming days I am excited to see other museums related to this work and also to take a guided tour of the Lombroso museum. Hopefully, being able to compare between my own experience walking alone in the museum and this guided tour, will highlight areas of my own bias in interpretation and shed light as to how the museum wants visitors to see and take away from Lombroso's work.