Anche il più piccolo particolare. Cesare Lombroso indaga sul caso Verzeni

In his investigations into the criminals, Cesare Lombroso tenaciously pursues the experimental method. He measures, collects, classifies the most widely diverse cases. Crime bodies, writings, drawings, tattoos, portraits of faces, gait patterns as well as emerging findings on organs, pro portions, malformations, wounds. Everything is written down, compared and scrupulously catalogued in the conviction that eventually it will be useful. The rationale of this operation is that details, even the most insignificant ones, do not stop speaking to those who know how to listen. However, Lombroso frequently proves to misunderstand what these details reveal, and elaborates fascinating and staggering interpretations, which forced him to constantly recon sider and change his hypotheses, without turning down his previous considerations. Thus, an emblematic case is the murderer Vincenzo Verzeni, extensively quoted in Lombroso’s works and reconstructed here from published and unpublished materials. The aim of this paper is to shed a different light on the epistemological approach of the Veronese alienist and on his conception of his own scientific enterprise, by analysing the story of Verzeni, who represented one of the most emblematic figures of Lombroso’s zibaldone.