book reviews 753 Maria Antonietta Grignani, Paolo Mazzarello, Ombre nella mente. Lombroso e lo scapigliato. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2020. 174 pp. 15€. isbn:978-88-399-3411-2. At the turn of the 19th century, Pavia was one of the most culturally renown and prestigious cities in Italy and Europe. Indeed, several important scientists and intellectuals were gravitating around the University of Pavia. More specifically, prestigious physicians, anatomists and biologists like Lazzaro Spallanzani, Giovanni Zoja, and Paolo Mantegazza had worked at the University of Pavia thus making its reputation undisputed in the field of medicine. The 19th century was a period of political unrest in Italy leading, only after years of civil war and social uncertainty, to the Risorgimento and political unity. Pavia, located in Lombardy, was a crucial place for the political history of the country. The cultural and political relevance of Pavia is the starting point of Ombre nella mente. Lombroso e lo scapigliato by Maria Antonietta Grignani and Paolo Mazzarello. Indeed, the book tells the parallel stories of the alienist Cesare Lombroso and the writer Carlo Dossi. Cesare Lombroso studied at the University of Pavia; it is there that he conducted his first experiments, graduating at the Faculty of Medicine where personalities like Bartolomeo Panizza and Luigi Porta were teaching. Likewise, Alberto Carlo Pisani Dossi – better known as Carlo Dossi – began his career at the same university in 1866, studying Law despite his literary aspirations. Dossi was still a student when Lombroso established himself as a curious physician fascinated by uncommon mental phenomena. Looking for empirical evidence for his research on mental diseases, Lombroso embarked in a series of trips around Italy, particularly in Calabria and in the rural zones of Lombardy, to investigate phenomena like ‘cretinism’ and to directly observe ‘abnormal’ features of human types ‘damaged’ by insanity. During these years, Lombroso sketched a first version of his criminal anthropology. According to him, criminals had specific physical features that he could classify on the grounds of a precise taxonomy. Lombroso used the bulk of these data to write L’uomo criminale, first published in 1876. In those same years, Carlo Dossi developed a certain curiosity for the bizarre professors that were animating the lie of the university of Pavia: to them, and to their strange behaviours, he dedicated his first ironic writings. Cesare Lombroso – the strange professor Lombroso, renowned for his unconventional theories – was one of them. In 1876, Dossi read L’uomo criminale and was struck by it. On July 12, 1876, he wrote his first letter to Lombroso: it was the beginning of a long correspondence. Ombre nella mente narrates with historiographical rigour the fertile intellectual exchange between Lombroso and Dossi. The book proposes a clear overview of the developments of different intellectual endeavours: medicine and anthropology on the one hand, and Italian literature on Nuncius © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/18253911-03503015 754 book reviews the other. Thanks to these two protagonists of the intellectual landscape, literature and medicine influenced and enriched one another in a period that was marked by positivism and literary innovations. The volume moves between three spatial dimensions: the local one (the city of Pavia), the national one (Italy), and the global one (the international context). The authors track the gradual evolution of Dossi from a simple ‘admirer’ of Lombroso’s theories to the active role he played first as collaborator and then as patient of Lombroso. Always following the chronology of the correspondence between Lombroso and Dossi, the book is divided into four chapters. The Prologo introduces the reader to the figure of Cesare Lombroso. The first chapter, titled L’alienista e lo scrittore, focuses on Lombroso’s and Dossi’s education, and it describes the main historical and theoretical developments of Lombroso’s science, focusing on his methods and on the publication of Genio e Follia, in which he developed the idea of the psycho-physical connection between personality and physical appearance. The chapter titled Teorema lombrosiano perfetto is entirely devoted to an analysis of the correspondence, reconstructing chronologically and theoretically their strong and long-lasting relationship, from mere exchange of ideas to scientific collaboration. This partnership proved unexpectedly fruitful. Finally, a conclusion is sketched in the last chapter, Epilogo, which focuses on the end of this relationship, also exploring how both the two protagonists became seduced by the new frontiers of spiritualism in the final years of their lives. Grignani and Mazzarello’s book is an original work in that it treats literature and science at the same level. Maria Antonietta Grignani contributes to the volume with her expertise as a linguist and literary scholar, while Mazzarello explores the scientific dimension as a historian of medicine. The book has also the merit to be a pleasant reading: it could be read not only as an accurate research on an interesting chapter in the history of science, but also as a new and a detailed study on the broader culture of 19th-century Italy. This book could be read by an expert public and a broader one at the same time: scholars can find original lines of research intertwining science and literature; lay readers can appreciate the core of the narrative structure itself. Finally, the book wisely mixes published sources and archival material. The use and approach to sources is one of the main strengths of the book: the work that the authors have done with archival material coming from Archivio Pisani Dossi, Archivio Storico dell’Università degli Studi di Pavia, Fondo Archivistico della Collezione Pisani Dossi, and Museo di Antropologia Criminale ‘Cesare Lombroso’, is well organized and masterfully distributed through the text. Moreover, Ombre nella mente provides the reader with a critical and informative portrayal of the historical context of Italian political history. Ombre nella mente Nuncius 35 (2020) 737–758 book reviews 755 is an original journey through science and literature that has the courage to investigate, under an unusual point of view, two controversial protagonists at the turn of the 20th century. Fabio Lusito University of Bari, Bari, Italy fabio.lusito@uniba.it Nuncius 35 (2020) 737–758