Museo di Antropologia Criminale Cesare Lombroso (Cesare Lombroso Museum of Criminal Anthropology), Turin

Museo di Antropologia Criminale Cesare Lombroso (Cesare Lombroso Museum of Criminal Anthropology) is a museum in Turin, founded in 1876 by the physician and anthropologist Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909). The exhibition is part of the museum system of the University of Turin.

The collection was opened to the public for the first time in 1884, on the occasion of the anthropology exhibition organized in the general exhibition of Turin, but it was only in 1892 that the medical faculty of the Turin University announced its decision to set up a museum of psychiatry and criminology, without however yet electing the Lombrosian collection to that rank. This despite Arturo Graf, the university's rector at the time, described it as "the first criminal museum in Europe" .

The museum brings together the private collection collected by Lombroso himself, founder of criminal anthropology , a discipline mainly based on the parascience of physiognomy, so named already by Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC), perfected by Lombroso himself in the late 19th century and today judged without scientific value. On display are objects that Lombroso accumulated over the course of his life, initially keeping them in the private space of his own home. There are therefore no explicit and pre-established selection criteria. Finds such as anatomical preparations, drawings, photographs, bodies of the crime and handcrafted creations of prisoners in prisons and criminal asylums are collected. These objects, coming from different parts of the world thanks to the shipments of students and admirers of Lombroso, were studied in order to confirm the theory of criminal atavism, which later proved to be unfounded.

The museum contains about 684 skulls and 27 human skeletal remains, 183 human brains (not exposed), 58 skulls and 48 animal skeletal remains, 502 bodies of crime used to commit more or less bloody crimes, 42 restraints, a hundred masks mortuaries, 175 artefacts and 475 drawings of insane people, thousands of photographs of criminals, madmen and prostitutes, clothes of brigands, and three models of carnivorous plants. There is also Lombroso's skeleton, which he wanted to leave to science, as well as his face preserved in formalin.