Poor Giovanni Fadda

Abstract

Almost 20 years after the Fadda trial, in 1898, Scipio Sighele, a lawyer and first-generation sociologist of the Lombroso school, describes the average Italian:

The average type has a fortunate and knowing dose of resignation, such that he contents himself with the place that nature has given him. He has neither great ambitions nor unachievable desires; perhaps he complains, verbally, about the numerous injustices that weigh down upon him, as on everybody, but doesn’t find in himself the energy to attempt to rebel in one way or another against these injustices, and thus he resigns himself to living the less bad life possible, in the place and condition that his birth, his family, and his economic status have assigned him.¹