Abstract

The criminal history of Giuseppe Musolino was once described, by the national press, through the myth of the last brigand who takes revenge for the wrongs suffered by escaping capture by law enforcement, thanks to the protection of the local populations. The reading of the archive documents, highlights inventions and emphasis induced by the cultural climate of positivist anthropology, based on the schemes of biological criminology and the «degenerative constitutionalism» of the «Calabrians», of Lombrosian origin. It also brings out the parable of a common bandit, with possible early mental disorders, which the media hype and the harsh conditions of incarceration have transformed into a human wreck under pathological selfaggrandizement and paranoid delusions, that will follow him until his death in a mental hospital