The Museum will virtually bring to your homes a selection of photographs coming from our archive. Every week you will discover new images.
Comba Francesco, also known as Malicennau, Cagliari, late 19th-early 20th century.
Efisio Murgia, albumen print.
The boy here depicted was part of the “picciocus de crobi” of Cagliari (a Sardinian dialect phrase that literally means “boys of the basket”) children and adolescents often without family or abandoned, barefooted, poorly dressed and undernourished, that between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century were brought to crime due to their difficult living conditions.
This photograph belongs to a series of 275 images preserved in the museum’s archive and part of a research on Cagliari’s juvenile delinquents, held between 1898 and 1903 by Lombroso’s collaborator and professor at the University of Cagliari, Mario Carrara, along with Sardinian forensic pathologist and amateur photographer Efisio Murgia.