The Museum will virtually bring to your homes a selection of photographs coming from our archive. Every week you will discover new images.
Brigandesses, ca. 1865.
Unidentified photographer, albumen print on cardboard
The brigandesses here portrayed are important figures in the history of Southern Italy’s brigandage: Filomena Pennacchio (top left) companion of the brigand Giuseppe Schiavone, Giuseppina Vitale (top right) and Maria Giovanna Tito (lying on one side).
The photograph is inserted in Lombroso’s Album dei delinquenti n.1 (the Album of delinquents n.1) where we can also find a description of Filomena Pennacchio as a woman with marked male traits: “thick and very black hair, tall and handsome figure, shows a strength superior to her sex; the eye injected with blood, the grim and suspicious look, the lip always open to a contemptuous smile, you will see in her at the same time the brave and the fierce woman”.
This and other photographs of female criminal subjects were collected by Lombroso to be used in support of his thesis that saw in delinquent women the tendency to masculinize.