Abstract

The essay is based on a statistical report by the physiologist Angelo Mosso, which was presented in one of his most important works, La Fatica (1891). It is about the ineligible people in the Sicilian hinterland because of their physical defects. The Piedmontese Mosso, who was an officer in the medical commissions operating in Sicily twenty years earlier, presents a disastrous health situation, leading many exponents of the Lombrosian school to underline the supposed (ethno-anthropological) difference of the southern populations.