Museum of Criminal Anthropology

The most uncomfortable museum in Turin, and one of the most fascinating. Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) was the founder of "criminal anthropology" — a now-discredited nineteenth-century theory that crime was inherited and could be read from the body. The museum, attached to the university's medical faculty, displays his original collection of skulls, plaster casts, prisoner art and death masks.

The presentation is honest about the moral horror of Lombroso's project, but does not try to hide his materials. Open Tuesday to Sunday; not for children, not for anyone squeamish about cabinets full of human remains. A landmark in the history of pseudoscience, and a strong corrective to anyone who imagines nineteenth-century rationalism was harmless.

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A story
Cesare Lombroso believed criminals were a biological throwback, identifiable by the shape of their skulls. He spent his career measuring and casting the heads of executed prisoners; his own preserved head, by his own request, sits in a glass case in the final room of the museum he founded.

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