A Strange Custom

Indice

-Introduction
Silvano Montaldo, Cristina Cilli

-“The Primitive Ornament”. Debates and Collecting in the Birth of Criminology
Silvano Montaldo

-The Collection of the Cesare Lombroso Museum of Criminal Anthropology
Cristina Cilli, Ilaria Serati

-Fragments of Dark Lives
Cristina Stalteri

-The Zouave, the Bandit, and the Brothel Servant. Female Tattoos and the Lombrosian Archive
Alessio Petrizzo

-The TAZEBAO Project
Davide Borra

-The 3D Installation for the Tattoo Collection
Riccardo Gagliarducci, Luca Porru, Riccardo Covino

-The Tattoo Collection of Cesare Lombroso. Legal Profiles between Digitisation and Permanent Museum Installations
Roberto Cavallo Perin, Francesca Paruzzo

-The Goddess Fortuna and Tattooing in the Mediterranean
Silvano Montaldo, Cristina Stalteri

-Bibliography

-Index

-Author Biographies

Before punks and skinheads, before American pachucos and Parisian apaches, there were Emilio, Ciro, Alexandre, Jean, Giovanni, Francesco and many others. They were not members of a youth movement, but their criminal records and tattoos drew the attention of Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909). The Italian criminologist had their portraits drawn, interviewed them about the meanings of the designs on their skin, and recorded notes about their meandering lives. Lombroso was looking for visible signs of abnormality and believed he had found them in the tattoos. Through the lens of nineteenth-century criminal anthropology, this provides us with an exceptional record of the emergence of one of today’s most widespread forms of personal expression, to which this catalogue and a new 3D installation in the Lombroso Museum’s exhibition itinerary are dedicated.