Antonio Boggia was a mason and handyman from Lake Como who worked in Milan in the middle of the 19th century. Between 1849 and 1859, according to the charges on which he was tried, he killed four people for their money. Three were men who had business dealings with him: a laborer, a grain broker and a smith. He brought each to a storeroom with a cellar that he kept in the Stretta Bagnera, a narrow lane in the center of the city, struck them with an axe and buried them under the floor. The fourth was an elderly widow whose building he managed. In each case he used powers of attorney, some forged and one obtained with the help of an impostor, to collect what the dead owned.
He was caught only in 1860, after the widow's son went to the authorities. Her body was found first, and then the three skeletons in the cellar. Nine years earlier Boggia had attacked another man with an axe in the same storeroom; that man survived, and Boggia was declared insane and confined to an asylum for a time. At his trial in November 1861 the defense again argued insanity. The court rejected it and sentenced him to death. He was hanged outside the city walls on April 8, 1862. His head was kept for study at the Ospedale Maggiore and is linked in later accounts to Cesare Lombroso. The lane where the men were found, today via Bagnera, is often described as the narrowest street in Milan, and his name has stayed attached to it.
Boggia was born on December 23, 1799, at Urio, a village on Lake Como that is today part of the comune of Carate Urio (Storia di Milano; Focus; MilanoToday). He left the village for good in 1818, the local historian Mauro Colombo writes, and went to Milan, where he set up a small building business. It failed.
What happened next comes from accounts that draw on his later case file. Colombo says only that after the failure Boggia took refuge in Piedmont and later returned to Milan. Several Milan outlets give a fuller version: at 25, in 1824, he faced a fraud complaint and a number of unpaid bills of exchange, fled to the Kingdom of Sardinia, was tried there over a brawl and an attempted murder, and escaped from prison during a revolt before making his way back to Lombardy (MilanoToday; QuiComo; Divina Milano). These details have not been checked against a record from the period.
Back in Milan he lived first in via Montenapoleone, Colombo writes, and then in via Nerino. He worked as a mason and did small carpentry jobs. For a time he tended the stoves at Palazzo Cusani, which housed the Austrian military command; MilanoToday and Divina Milano say his knowledge of German helped him get that post. He also went to public auctions, where he had a fair reputation. He married in 1831, according to MilanoToday and Affaritaliani, and afterward lived at via Nerino 2. Colombo describes him at the time of the crimes as a widower with children; 7giorni says his wife died in unexplained circumstances and that he had at least one child.
He was a regular at the church of San Giorgio al Palazzo, a few steps from via Nerino, and his neighbors thought of him as devout and obliging (Storia di Milano). The sentence later passed on him, as quoted by Milano Città Stato and Affaritaliani, described a man of calm manners and an outwardly kindly look, careful in religious practice and with no visible vices. Some accounts call him a master builder (capomastro) (Mentelocale; MilanoPlatinum).
He also kept, near his home, a storeroom with a cellar in the Stretta Bagnera, a lane that runs from via Nerino to via Santa Marta. He used it as a store and an office (Milano Città Stato, 2023; Storia di Milano).
The first man to die was Angelo Serafino Ribbone, a laborer who had worked for Boggia (Storia di Milano). Divina Milano calls him a childhood friend from the same area who had helped Boggia return to Milan. Ribbone had savings of 1,400 svanziche, the Austrian lire then in use in Lombardy, held for him by a cousin on Lake Como.
In 1848, Colombo writes, Ribbone gave Boggia a power of attorney to collect that money. The first mandate, a general one drawn up by a notary named Gaslini in Milan, was not accepted. Boggia then lured Ribbone to the storeroom on a pretext and killed him. To get the money he brought in an accomplice who posed as Ribbone, with two false witnesses, before two notaries. That produced a special mandate from a notary named Terzaghi of Lodi, and after a magistrate (pretore) gave a favorable opinion, the cousin paid out. Boggia kept the money. The charge sheet at his trial dated the murder to April 1849 (Storia di Milano; Divina Milano). 7giorni gives April 1848 or 1849.
Ribbone's body was cut apart and buried in the Stretta Bagnera cellar (MilanoToday; QuiComo). Nobody reported him missing in a way that led anywhere.
The second man was a well-off grain broker named Marchesotti. Accounts disagree on his first name: Colombo gives Giovanni, while Divina Milano, MilanoToday and MilanoPlatinum give Giuseppe. Boggia probably met him at an auction, Colombo writes, and persuaded him to put 4,000 svanziche into a deal he presented as highly profitable. Marchesotti borrowed the money from a lender named Castiglioni (Storia di Milano; 7giorni).
On the morning of Saturday, January 15, 1850, Marchesotti was seen with Boggia at a tavern at Ponte Vetero, and the two left together. He was never seen alive again. His family and the lender reported him missing, but the case was closed on the assumption that he had run off with the money (Storia di Milano; 7giorni). The charge sheet dated his murder to January 15, 1850 (Divina Milano).
The third man was Pietro Meazza, a smith with a workshop near the Carrobbio, in the same part of the city (Storia di Milano). Other accounts describe him as an ironmonger or hardware dealer (MilanoToday; Il Giornale, 2008, which gives his nickname as "el bauscia"); 7giorni gives his first name once as Giuseppe.
His business was struggling, and it came to Boggia's attention through a mutual friend named Binda. Meazza gave Boggia a mandate to run the shop. Boggia then sold it to Binda for less than it was worth, and Meazza never received anything. Complaints about his disappearance and about the sale went nowhere (Storia di Milano; 7giorni). Colombo's narrative places this business in 1851; the charge sheet at trial dated the murder to April 1850 (Storia di Milano; Divina Milano).
Il Giornale's account, from 2008, says Boggia's method with these men was to offer them a share in a building contract, ask for a deposit of 1,000 to 2,000 lire, and strike them on the head with an axe once they were in the cellar. All three were buried there.
In early April 1851 Boggia tried the same thing again. He invited an elderly bookkeeper to the storeroom, saying he wanted the man to check some accounts, and struck him on the head with an axe while he was bent over a desk (Storia di Milano). Colombo dates the attack to April 3, 1851; the charge sheet at trial gave April 2.
The bookkeeper was not killed. He got up, ran into the street bleeding with Boggia behind him, and was helped by an acquaintance who was a customs or finance guard. The guard had Boggia arrested (Storia di Milano; 7giorni). Focus says the injured man reported Boggia himself.
The case did not go to trial. Boggia was judged insane and confined to the Senavra, the Pia Casa della Senavra, which was Milan's asylum (Storia di Milano; MilanoToday). The Austrian authorities ordered three months there, according to MilanoToday and QuiComo; Colombo and Focus say he was treated and released after a few years. Mentelocale says he was considered mad but not criminal. Il Giornale, in 2008, described the outcome as an acquittal on the ground that he had acted on a sudden fit. When the case came up again at his trial a decade later, Colombo writes, the bookkeeper's testimony suggested that madness had had little to do with it.
No one at the time connected the attack with the three missing men.
Ester Maria Perrocchio was a widow over 70 who owned a building in via Santa Marta, at the other end of the Stretta Bagnera (Storia di Milano). 7giorni gives the address as via Santa Marta 10, number 2824 in the older Teresian numbering. Several accounts say she was 76 and that she owned the building in via Nerino where Boggia had lived since his marriage (MilanoToday; QuiComo; MilanoPlatinum). MilanoPlatinum describes her as an elderly and eccentric widow who looked after a colony of cats in the courtyard. Her son, Giovanni Maurier, also spelled Murier, worked as a decorator for the Richard ceramics firm (MilanoPlatinum; Milano Città Stato, 2025).
Boggia had done masonry work in the building and had become her agent (Storia di Milano; 7giorni). He tried to have her sign a power of attorney before a notary named Cattaneo. Cattaneo refused: according to 7giorni, she seemed confused and vulnerable. The notary went further and asked the local court to begin proceedings to have her declared incapable of managing her affairs. That matter was dropped when Boggia said she lived in Como, outside the Milan court's area (Storia di Milano).
Boggia killed her with an axe in her flat. The charge sheet at trial dated the murder to May 11, 1859 (Storia di Milano; Divina Milano). By his own later account, given to the investigating judge, he washed away the blood afterward and took gold items, which he sold to a jeweler (Storia di Milano). MilanoPlatinum says he struck her during a morning conversation about the war. He hid her body behind masonry under a staircase in the building (Storia di Milano; Divina Milano).
He then took her building over. He presented an impostor to a notary named Bolza in Como, and this time a power of attorney was drawn up naming him sole administrator of her property (Storia di Milano; MilanoToday). He raised the rents, began repairs no one had asked for, and drove away the cats she fed. A friend who was a calligrapher wrote letters in her name to reassure her son and the tenants (Storia di Milano; Milano Città Stato, 2025).
Giovanni Maurier was told by the building's caretakers, a couple named Trasselli, that his mother had gone to stay on Lake Como (Storia di Milano). Boggia showed him letters that appeared to come from her. Maurier found them vague. The police took no action at first.
Boggia then proposed an arrangement: Maurier's mother would lease the building to a single tenant, and Maurier would get a flat on the second floor. He took Maurier to a notary to settle it. The notary was Cattaneo, who recognized the situation, refused to act and sent Boggia away, and Maurier learned for the first time that the notary had already refused a mandate from his mother (Storia di Milano; 7giorni).
On February 26, 1860, Maurier filed a formal complaint about his mother's disappearance (Storia di Milano; Focus). 7giorni says he lodged it with the Milan civil and criminal court in Corso San Gottardo. Accounts say he went to the Carabinieri Reali, whose Milan command was then in Palazzo Cattaneo in via Moscova (Milano Città Stato, 2025; Affaritaliani).
The case went to an investigating judge named Crivelli; Divina Milano gives his first name as Cesare (Storia di Milano). Crivelli found that Boggia had a record: the 1851 axe attack in the same storeroom (Focus; MilanoPlatinum).
He questioned the people in the building. The Trasselli couple remembered Boggia working on the roof on the day Perrocchio was last seen and asking them for water; Focus and 7giorni say he asked the doorkeeper for two buckets of water. A neighbor had seen him carrying a large basket down the stairs the next day (Storia di Milano; 7giorni). Focus says a witness had also seen Perrocchio arguing with Boggia shortly before she disappeared. Other tenants had seen him handling mason's sacks, bricks and sand (MilanoToday; QuiComo).
A search of the building found Perrocchio's body under the stairs, badly decomposed and missing its legs and head (Storia di Milano; MilanoPlatinum). Faced with it, Boggia confessed to killing her (Storia di Milano). Focus says he confessed and then showed investigators where the body was.
In the storeroom in the Stretta Bagnera, investigators found the forged letters, the false mandate in Perrocchio's name, and two further mandates: one from Ribbone and one from Meazza, which authorized the sale of Meazza's shop (Storia di Milano; MilanoToday). Neither man could be found.
Crivelli had the cellar floor dug up. The searchers expected two bodies and found three (MilanoToday; QuiComo). Boggia refused to help (Storia di Milano). The skeletons were identified as Ribbone, Marchesotti and Meazza. Colombo, drawing on the case file, says Meazza was identified with certainty by his missing front teeth and by a hernia truss found with the remains; Divina Milano gives the identifications as presumed for Ribbone, probable for Marchesotti and certain for Meazza. The remains had been cut apart (Divina Milano). Milano Città Stato, in 2018, dated the finding of the four bodies to March 1860.
Boggia was charged with:
the robbery murder of Angelo Serafino Ribbone, dated April 1849;
the robbery murder of Marchesotti, dated January 15, 1850;
the robbery murder of Pietro Meazza, dated April 1850;
the attempted murder of the bookkeeper, dated April 2, 1851;
the robbery murder of Ester Maria Perrocchio, dated May 11, 1859;
attempted fraud and the substitution of persons in public deeds.
That list is the charge sheet as given by Colombo and Divina Milano. In every case the motive charged was robbery: the killings were the means of taking the victims' savings, business or property.
The trial opened in Milan on November 18, 1861, and lasted five days (Storia di Milano; Focus; MilanoPlatinum). The sentence, as quoted in later press, came from the Tribunale di Milano (Milano Città Stato, 2025; Affaritaliani). None of the sources opened names the judges, the prosecutor, the defense lawyers or any medical experts.
The defense was insanity. It relied in part on the outcome of the 1851 case, when Boggia had been found insane rather than tried (Storia di Milano; 7giorni). In prison, Focus and 7giorni report, he complained of headaches, took off his clothes in his cell and sang or shouted at night. In court he said he did not know what had come over him and that he had acted on a sudden impulse; 7giorni says the defense claimed his head had told him to kill. MilanoPlatinum says he hoped to be sent back to the Senavra.
The court did not accept it. Colombo writes that the bookkeeper's evidence about the 1851 attack showed that madness had played little part in it. MilanoPlatinum notes that the court saw the killings as carefully planned and the frauds as cunning. Boggia was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging.
The appeal was rejected, and so was the review at third instance (Storia di Milano; Divina Milano). A request for clemency went to the king, who refused it. On April 6, 1862, Boggia was told that nothing more could be done and that the sentence would be carried out (Storia di Milano; 7giorni).
Milan had no executioner of its own, so two were brought in, one from Turin and one from Parma (Storia di Milano; Milano Città Stato, 2018). Colombo writes that people who offered to do the job were turned away.
On April 8, 1862, Boggia was taken out of the city in a covered cart draped in black, followed by carriages carrying court officials and members of the prison commission (Storia di Milano; 7giorni). He was hanged on open ground outside the walls, between Porta Vigentina and Porta Ludovica, which MilanoPlatinum describes as the usual place of execution. A large crowd, children among them, watched (Storia di Milano; MilanoPlatinum). Mentelocale describes the crowd as hostile.
Il Giorno, in 2025, called him the last person executed in Milan. Most accounts phrase it more narrowly, as the last execution of a civilian in Milan before the Second World War (MilanoToday; 7giorni; Milano Città Stato, 2025). The death penalty was abolished in Italy in 1890 under the Zanardelli code (MilanoToday; QuiComo).
Boggia's body was buried without its head in the Gentilino cemetery, outside Porta Ludovica, a burial ground that no longer exists (Storia di Milano; 7giorni). The head went to the anatomical cabinet of the Ospedale Maggiore, Milan's main hospital. Colombo cites a letter of April 4, 1862, held in the Milan State Archive and found by Stefano Curcurù, as the request for the head to be sent there for preparation and study. MilanoToday and QuiComo say the request came from a doctor named Pietro Labus.
At the hospital the head was examined by doctors, among them Cesare Lombroso, who judged its features typical of a murderer (Storia di Milano; MilanoPlatinum). Focus calls Lombroso the father of criminal physiognomy, and several accounts say Boggia's head was used to support his theory of the born criminal (MilanoToday; QuiComo; 7giorni). Il Giornale wrote in 2009 that Lombroso concluded the head showed the typical traits of a multiple killer. No source opened quotes Lombroso's own words about Boggia or says where he wrote about him, and the claim that the head was "given" to Lombroso (Focus; MilanoToday) is not supported by Colombo, who places the study at the hospital.
The head stayed at the Ospedale Maggiore until 1949. That year, during a clearance of the hospital's anatomical collection, it was buried with other remains at the Musocco cemetery (Storia di Milano; Milano Città Stato, 2018; 7giorni).
In October 2009 a butcher's cleaver linked to Boggia appeared on the collectors' market. It was in a wooden box marked "Ospitale Maggiore Milano" and carried a handwritten label reading "del Boggia Antonio" (Storia di Milano). How it left the hospital is not known. MilanoToday and Affaritaliani say it is now held by the Museo di Arte Criminologica at Olevano di Lomellina, in the province of Pavia. Colombo notes that the trial record speaks of an axe.
The Stretta Bagnera survives as via Bagnera, also called vicolo Bagnera, a short bent lane between via Nerino and via Santa Marta, near via Torino and piazza San Giorgio, in the area known as the Cinque Vie (Il Giorno, 2025; Milano Città Stato, 2023). It is regularly described as the narrowest street in Milan. Milano Città Stato wrote in 2023 that even small cars struggle to get through.
The name has nothing to do with the crimes. Il Giornale, in 2009, traced "Bagnera" to the Latin balnearia, a place of public baths in Roman Milan. Maurizio Cucchi, writing in Il Giorno in 2025, cited Valentino De Carlo's book Le strade di Milano for a document of 1050 that mentions a place called "baniaria" near the church of San Giorgio, and suggested a Roman bath building once stood there. Milano Città Stato made the same point in 2026.
For years the walls of the lane were covered with graffiti; Cucchi wrote in 2025 that volunteers had since cleaned them. A local story that a sudden cold draft in the lane is Boggia's ghost is repeated in many Milan outlets as folklore (MilanoToday; Milano Città Stato, 2023; 7giorni). 7giorni says that "non fare il Boggia" (don't play the Boggia) came to mean hiding deceit behind friendly manners.
The standard book on the case is Giovanni Luzzi's Il giallo della stretta Bagnera, published by Libreria Milanese in Milan and cited by Colombo and MilanoPlatinum. Colombo also cites an article by A. Gazza Franchini in the magazine Historia, no. 172, from 1972. Alberto Paleari's L'estro del male (Edizioni e/o) is a novel based on the case (MilanoPlatinum). Milano Città Stato drew on Alberto Pezzotta and Anna Gilardelli's guide Milano d'Italia (Bompiani) for its 2018 account of the execution.
Modern writers often call Boggia the first serial killer in Italian history and compare him to Jack the Ripper, whose killings in London came about three decades later (Focus; Mentelocale). Focus argues that by today's standards he would be classed that way. What the record shows is narrower and clearer: a Milan court convicted him of four separate robbery murders spread over ten years, all tied to the theft of the victims' money or property.
Execution date. Most sources give April 8, 1862 (Il Giorno; Milano Città Stato; MilanoToday; 7giorni; MilanoPlatinum). Focus gives April 9, Mentelocale April 6; April 6 is the date Colombo and 7giorni give for when Boggia was told the sentence would be carried out. Affaritaliani and Milano Città Stato mention that "some sources" give November 18, 1861, which is the date the trial opened.
Sentence date. Il Giornale, in 2008, gave the death sentence as November 28, 1859, a year in which Boggia had not yet been caught; the other sources put the trial in November 1861.
Victim names. Ribbone is also spelled Ribone (Il Giornale; 7giorni). Marchesotti's first name is Giovanni in Colombo and Giuseppe elsewhere. Meazza is Pietro in most accounts and Giuseppe once in 7giorni. The son's surname appears as Maurier, Murier and Mourier.
Dates of the men's killings. The charge sheet gives April 1849 for Ribbone and April 1850 for Meazza; Colombo's narrative puts Ribbone's mandate in 1848 and Meazza's business with Binda in 1851. The bookkeeper attack is dated April 3, 1851, in Colombo's narrative and April 2 in the charge sheet.
Where Perrocchio's body was found. Colombo and Divina Milano place it under the stairs of her building in via Santa Marta; MilanoPlatinum places it under the stairs of the via Nerino building; several outlets say it was found walled into a niche in the Stretta Bagnera storeroom.
The 1851 outcome. Accounts describe three months in the Senavra, "a few years" there, or an acquittal on the ground of a sudden fit.
Il Giornale wrote in 2008 that none of his crimes was committed on a Saturday; Colombo and 7giorni say Marchesotti was last seen with him on Saturday, January 15, 1850.
Lombroso. The link rests on later accounts; no source opened quotes Lombroso on Boggia.
Milano Città Stato wrote in 2018 that he walled victims up alive; no other source says so, and the case-file accounts describe killings with an axe.
December 23, 1799: Antonio Boggia is born at Urio, on Lake Como.
1818: leaves Urio for Milan; his small building business later fails.
1824 (by several later accounts): fraud complaint and unpaid bills; flight to the Kingdom of Sardinia, prison and escape.
1831: marries; later lives at via Nerino 2.
1848: Angelo Serafino Ribbone gives him a power of attorney to collect his savings.
April 1849: murder of Ribbone in the Stretta Bagnera storeroom (charge sheet).
January 15, 1850: Marchesotti, a grain broker, is last seen leaving a tavern at Ponte Vetero with Boggia.
April 1850: murder of Pietro Meazza (charge sheet).
April 2 or 3, 1851: axe attack on an elderly bookkeeper in the storeroom; the victim escapes; Boggia is arrested, judged insane and confined to the Senavra asylum.
May 11, 1859: murder of Ester Maria Perrocchio (charge sheet); Boggia takes over her building with a power of attorney obtained through an impostor.
February 26, 1860: her son, Giovanni Maurier, files a complaint; investigating judge Crivelli takes the case.
1860: Perrocchio's body is found under a staircase; Boggia confesses to killing her; three skeletons are dug up in the Stretta Bagnera cellar.
November 18, 1861: trial opens in Milan; after five days he is sentenced to death.
1862: appeal and third-instance review rejected; the king refuses clemency.
April 4, 1862: letter requesting his head for the Ospedale Maggiore's anatomical cabinet.
April 6, 1862: Boggia is told the sentence will be carried out.
April 8, 1862: hanged between Porta Vigentina and Porta Ludovica; body buried at the Gentilino cemetery.
1890: the Zanardelli code abolishes the death penalty in Italy.
1949: his head is buried at Musocco with other anatomical remains.
October 2009: a cleaver labeled "del Boggia Antonio" appears on the collectors' market.
2025: Il Giorno reports volunteers have cleaned the graffiti from via Bagnera.