Cesare Lombroso e le razze criminali. Sulla teoria dell’inferiorità dei meridionali

From the measurements of the skull to the \’negritude of Calabria\’. From emigration to the inferiority of the southerners. An essay that reconstructs the past and present divide between north and south. \’The melancholy behavior of the Calabrian, who in the wider southern container will take on the characteristics of the excitability of the ego, was already present in Galanti in the sadness of the funeral rites, as in many travelers of the romantic period\’. Lombroso takes up this ancient stereotype to refer it, as a natural datum, to the biological inferiority of populations. To melancholic pathology, Niceforo will note, idleness, dirt and violence are attributable. The streets and fountains are missing as well as the toilets, the beasts live in the streets where they often starve, schools lead to nothing, religion is superstition and justice is corrupt as administrators are, medicine still dedicated to the practice of bleeding by barbers. The feeling of being in front of small half-naked savages, children who ask for alms and who nestle in the burning rays of the sun.