Race and crime. A late ninetheent century Italian debate

At the end of the nineteenth century, in Italy, a lively dispute about the relationship between racial belonging and crime tendency started up. The book of Alfredo Niceforo La delinquenza in Sardegna can be considered at the origin of this bitter controversy. According to Niceforo, whose scientific approach was of Lombrosian matrix, the high number of crimes committed on the island (as well as in the whole of Southern Italy) could be traced to racial factors. The hypothesis of a connection between race and criminality met with numerous showings of approval and few criticisms, at that time. After all, this racialist thesis could be used by the Italian ruling class, between the nineteenth and twentieth century, as an instrument to govern the territorial complexity of a country that had only recently achieved political unity