The Museum will virtually bring to your homes a selection of photographs coming from our archive. Every week you will discover new images.
Guglielmo Fraft of Essen, Germany, early 20th century.
Unidentified photographer, aristotype print on cardboard.
On the back of the photograph it reads the story of this man: thirty years old, he was sentenced in the beginning of the 20th century by the court of Bolzano (North-East of Italy) to 6 months of hard labour for public violence. He was convicted seven more times for begging, vagrancy and violence. He enlisted in the Foreign Legion in Algeria and some of the tattoos on his body are evidence of his african militancy.
Lombroso identifies tattoo, a practice that, between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, diffuses mainly in prison, as a primitive feature that links criminals to primordial populations and therefore a proof of delinquency. The Museum’s photographic collection preserves over one hundred photographs of tattooed criminals, most of them from the “Le Nuove” prison in Turin, as well as from French and German jails.