page_title: Racism in Italy
section_title: Lombroso and scientific racism in Italy
hierarchical_section_title: Racism in Italy / 19th and early 20th centuries / Lombroso and scientific racism in Italy
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Distribuzione delle percentuali di Capelli Biondi nelle regioni italianeEnglish: Percentage of Blond Hair in the italian regions
context_page_description: Racism in Italy deals with the relationship between Italians and other populations of different ethnicities and/or nationalities which has existed throughout the country's history. Racism, like bigotry, is encountered in most societies, and Italy is no exception. Even though a unified sense of national-corporate identity as found in other European nations has been historically fragile, the peoples of Italy have long prided themselves on an absence of racial enmity.
  These ideas, albeit already common in relating to internal affairs, were first directed outwardly when Italy began invading and colonizing African countries in the late 19th century, though policies regarding "miscegenated" children were confusing. Under Benito Mussolini's fascist state, once the Italian régime consolidated its pact with Nazi Germany, anti-Semitic laws were passed, as were laws prohibiting internal migration under certain circumstances.
  The post-war migration from Southern Italy towards the more industrialized North engendered a degree of diffidence across the Italian social strata.
context_section_description: Even though there was already a wealth of Italian works engaging in racially motivated research on some groups, like those pertaining to the "Oriental" character of the Sardinians living under Savoyard rule, or their supposedly malevolent and "degenerated" nature, scientific racism as a proper discipline began to impose itself at the national level only through the works of the criminologist Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso's theory of atavism compared the "white civilization" among the other races with the "primitive" or "savage" societies.
  Lombroso would publish his thesis in the wake of the Italian unification, thus providing an explanation for the unrest developing immediately thereafter in the recently annexed portion of the new country; the people inhabiting the formerly Bourbon Kingdom were in fact racially stereotyped, thereby fostering feelings of Northern Italian supremacy over the Southeners, while being paradoxically integrated in the nation's broad collective imaginary; As the Southeners were collectively constructed for the first time as an "anti-nation" within the new country, they were deemed "atavistic" alongside criminals and prostitutes.
  Lombroso's theories connecting physiognomy to criminal behavior explicitly blamed higher homicide rates in Calabria, Sicily, and once again the Savoy-ruled island of Sardinia upon some residual influence of "Negroid" and "Mongoloid" blood amongst their populations. According to Lombroso, facial features like black hair, slight beard, bigger lips and longer nose were signs of such foreign "contamination" and directly correlated with a natural predisposition to delinquency.
  In 1871, Lombroso published "The White Man and the Man of Color", aimed at showing that the white man was superior in every respect to other races. Lombroso explicitly stated his belief in white supremacy: «It's a question of knowing if we whites, who haughtily tower over the summit of civilization, ought one day to bow down before the prognathous muzzle of the black, and the yellow, and to the frightful face of the Mongol; if, in the end, we owe our primacy to our biological organism or to the accidents of chance. (...) Only we whites have achieved the most perfect symmetry in the forms of the body [...] possess a true musical art [...] have proclaimed the freedom of the slave [...] have procured the liberty of thought». Lombroso proceeded again to equate the criminal offending of the white population to some inherited physical traits, pointing to a varying degree of residual "blackness".
  Lombroso, who also wrote extensively on the topic of anti-Semitism in Europe and attacked anti-Semitic racial theory, distinguished between European Jews, whom he considered generally "Aryan", and traditionalist Jews whose religious practices he excoriated.
  Other Italian anthropologists and sociologists also expanded on the theories previously set by Lombroso. The anthropologist Alfredo Niceforo, himself a Southener and more specifically a Sicilian, followed Lombroso's physiognomical approach, and in 1906 published a racial theory wherein blond pigmentation of hair and dark skin were both considered signs of foreign degeneration, while the "Italian race" was situated in a positive middle ground. According to Niceforo, the reason as to why criminal behaviour was so entrenched in inner Sardinia firmly lay in the racial inferiority of the native Sardinian population, more specifically stating that it was due to latter's historical isolation and the resulting «quality of the race that populated those areas, a race absolutely lacking the plasticity which causes the social conscience to change and evolve».
  Alfredo Niceforo believed that Italy's regional divisions found their explanation in the fact that the country harboured different populations belonging to two distinct races, the Alpine or "Aryan" in the North and the "Eurafrican" or Mediterranean in the South, and encouraged a statewide policy of race-mixing to properly civilize and dilute the most negative traits of the latter; the best example of such mixing, according to 
caption: Geographical distribution of blond hair in the "Italian geographical region", according to the physical anthropologist Renato Biasutti (1941).[21]
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