Vincenzo Verzeni was a young farm worker from Bottanuco, a farming village in the province of Bergamo, in Lombardy. In December 1870 a 14-year-old girl, Giovanna Motta, was strangled on her way to a nearby village. In August 1871 a young mother, Elisabetta Pagnoncelli, was killed the same way in the fields. Over the same years several women and girls in the district had been seized by the throat and had escaped by screaming or pleading. Verzeni, then 22, was arrested in January 1872. On April 9, 1873, a jury at the assize court of Bergamo convicted him of the two murders and of attempted murders, and he was sentenced to life at hard labor. One juror's vote decided that he would not be sentenced to death.
The case is remembered less for the trial than for what came after it. The court had called on Cesare Lombroso, then a young professor at the University of Pavia, to examine Verzeni's mental state. A few days after the sentence, Verzeni confessed to Lombroso alone. Lombroso published the case in 1873 and returned to it again and again in his book L'uomo delinquente ("Criminal Man"), in which he set out his criminal anthropology. Richard von Krafft-Ebing then made Verzeni the model case for one category of sexual murder in his Psychopathia Sexualis. For more than a century the case moved through textbooks, often with errors, including a story that Verzeni hanged himself in 1874. Archival and legal research shows that he served his sentence, was released around the turn of the century and died in his home village in 1918.
Verzeni was born in Bottanuco on April 11, 1849. His family worked the land. In Leonardo Sciascia's short story about the trial the family is called well off, but the legal scholar Sergio Seminara, who studied the case in 2024, doubts this. Lombroso found that Verzeni's father showed signs of pellagra, a disease of the rural poor in northern Italy caused by a diet of little but maize, and Seminara takes that as a sign that the family was far from comfortable.
What is known of the household comes almost entirely from two doctors who examined Verzeni in prison and wrote with the theories of their time. Lombroso recorded that two of Verzeni's uncles had what doctors then called cretinism, that one cousin had suffered a brain illness and that another was a repeat thief. Pasquale Penta, a young psychiatrist at the University of Naples who visited Verzeni in prison twenty years later, described the family as extremely mean with money and strictly devout, and the father as a heavy drinker of wine. In Penta's phrase, the family taught the boy nothing but the way to the fields and the way to church.
Religion was the most visible part of Verzeni's life in the village. Lombroso noted in 1876 that he was among the most regular churchgoers and penitents in the parish. At the trial his only alibi for the two killings was that on each of those days he had attended Mass three times, gone to confession and taken communion. Lombroso wrote that he had done badly at school; Penta wrote that he never went to school at all. Penta also recorded that at the time of his arrest Verzeni had two sweethearts in the village, and that his feeling for them seemed close to coldness.
Lombroso described him as silent and inclined to keep to himself, of ordinary intelligence and able to defend himself well. Nothing in his past pointed to mental illness. Verzeni later told Lombroso that from the age of about 12 he had found a strange pleasure in wringing the necks of chickens, killing many of them and blaming a marten or weasel for the losses.
According to Seminara's summary of the trial record as told by Sciascia, the first known attack came about four years before the killings, around 1867, when a 12-year-old cousin was attacked in her bed in the house next door. The attacker was not identified at the time. About three years before the killings two women were attacked, one after the other. A few months later there may have been an approach to another 12-year-old girl that stopped without any force being used. In each case the women's screams made the attacker run off.
Krafft-Ebing's case summary, which follows Lombroso's report, lists the attacks that formed part of the charges in a different way: an attempt, about four years before the trial, to strangle a woman of the household while she lay ill in bed; a similar attempt on a 27-year-old married woman; and an attempt on another married woman, whom he held down by the throat. The two lists may describe some of the same events, but the sources do not allow the attacks to be matched one by one. None of the women and girls who survived is named here.
Lombroso dated Verzeni's offending to the age of 17, which fits a first attack in 1866 or 1867.
Giovanna Motta, called Giovannina, was 14 years old. Krafft-Ebing's summary refers to the man who went looking for her as her master, which suggests she was in service with a local family. At the trial the prosecutor described her as lively, intelligent and in full health, and held up as a model to the other girls of her age. Nothing more about her life appears in the sources found.
On the morning of December 8, 1870, Giovanna Motta set out on foot for a neighboring village, leaving between seven and eight o'clock. When she did not come back, the man she worked for went to look for her. He found her body near the village, beside a path through the fields. She had been strangled, and her body had been stripped and mutilated. Parts of her clothing were found nearby under a pile of straw.
The first man suspected was a mason. He had an alibi that could not be disputed, but he was not freed at once: he spent about two months in jail before the court at Bergamo released him. Months passed. Only gradually, Sciascia's account says, did Verzeni's name begin to be whispered in the village.
Elisabetta Pagnoncelli was a married woman of about 28 and the mother of two young children, one of them still an infant at the breast, as the prosecutor reminded the jury. Krafft-Ebing's summary, drawn from Lombroso, records her under the surname Frigeni. Her husband is mentioned only as the man who went to find her.
Eight months after the first killing, at the end of August 1871, Elisabetta Pagnoncelli went out into the fields early in the morning. When she had not come back by eight o'clock, her husband went to fetch her. He found her dead in the field. She had been strangled with a strap or cord, and her body had been mutilated in a way that recalled the death of Giovanna Motta. Seminara gives the date the body was found as August 27, 1871; Krafft-Ebing gives August 28.
The day after Krafft-Ebing's date for the second killing, at about noon, a 19-year-old woman crossing a field was followed by Verzeni, who was her cousin. He pulled her into a field of grain, pushed her to the ground and began to choke her. When he let go for a moment to see whether anyone was near, she got up and begged him to let her go, and after holding her hands for some time he did. Seminara's summary also records an attack in April 1871 that ended the same way, with the woman's cries driving the attacker off. Only on two occasions, Seminara notes, was the attacker recognized, though other people remembered seeing Verzeni nearby.
Verzeni was arrested on January 11, 1872, on charges of murder and attempted murder. Krafft-Ebing's summary, written from Lombroso's report, says that he was accused of three attempts to strangle women and was held on suspicion of the two killings. No account found describes his questioning in detail. Seminara, reading Sciascia's version of the record, says that the interrogation showed a reasonably intelligent young man, and that three contradictions in his statements were never pressed. He denied everything.
There was no witness to either killing and no physical evidence tying Verzeni to them. Against him were the attacks on living women, his presence near the scenes and his lack of an alibi beyond church. Because the young man in the dock seemed so ordinary, Seminara explains, the court turned to the question of his responsibility, and in 1872 or 1873 it appointed Cesare Lombroso as its expert.
Lombroso had directed the asylum at Pesaro from 1871 and had returned to his teaching post at Pavia. In 1870 he had performed the autopsy on a man named Giuseppe Villella, whose skull, he later wrote, gave him the idea that criminals are throwbacks to an earlier stage of human evolution. He asked for Verzeni's head to be shaved so that he could measure it.
His report, as relayed by Krafft-Ebing, recorded a skull of more than average size but uneven, with the right side of the forehead narrower and lower than the left, a right ear smaller than the left, heavy cheekbones and jaw, and a slight squint. From these signs Lombroso concluded that the right frontal lobe of the brain had not developed fully. He recorded the cranial capacity as 1,577 cubic centimeters and the circumference as 561 millimeters. Yet, as Seminara stresses, Lombroso himself judged that these features had only limited value, and his conclusion for the court was that nothing he had found affected Verzeni's ability to understand and to will his acts. In the legal terms of the time, the expert found him responsible.
The trial took place before the Corte d'Assise of Bergamo, a court in which a jury decided guilt. The prosecutor, named in Sciascia's account as the cavalier Quintavalle, asked for conviction and told the court that on the question of sanity he would rely on the judgment of the experts. Verzeni's lawyer is not named in any source found.
One moment of the trial is told in detail in Sciascia's account. A young woman who had earlier identified Verzeni as her attacker took back her identification in court. The judges withdrew, leaving the courtroom in uproar, while her father begged her to recognize Verzeni. When the court returned, she asked forgiveness and said only that her attacker had looked very much like Verzeni. Seminara notes reports that she had been frightened into withdrawing her first statement. Her name is not given here.
Through the whole trial Verzeni denied the charges.
On April 9, 1873, the court found Verzeni guilty of the two murders and of the attempted murders that had been charged. Seminara, writing from the published record, counts three attempted murders among the convictions. The sentence was life at hard labor. The jury's margin was as narrow as it could be: in Seminara's words, it was the vote of a single juror that kept the sentence from being death.
The conviction became final. No appeal is recorded in any source found.
A few days after the sentence, Verzeni spoke to Lombroso alone. He said that he had truly killed the two women and tried to strangle the others, and that seizing a woman by the throat gave him an intense sexual pleasure. He said that in most attacks the act of choking had been enough and he had let the woman live, but that with the two women who died he had gone on until they were dead. He told Lombroso he had bitten Giovanna Motta and drunk some of her blood, and that he had carried away parts of her body and her clothing. He said that he had never been mad, but that while he attacked he saw nothing around him.
He explained his silence in court by fear of how his fellow villagers would react, and said he had told no one, not even his lawyer. Of his reason for telling Lombroso he said, in Seminara's quotation, "A Lei lo dico perché capisco che mi vuol bene" ("I am telling you because I understand that you wish me well"). He also told Lombroso that it would be a good thing to keep him in prison, because if he were free he could not resist the urge.
Lombroso took the confession at face value. Seminara faults him for never asking why a man who had denied everything for more than a year would confess only to him, and for never testing the confession against the evidence. Seminara also notes the oddity of Lombroso accepting a declaration of affection from a man he had treated chiefly as a subject for measurement.
Lombroso published the case in an essay titled "Verzeni e Agnoletti" in the Rivista di discipline carcerarie, a journal on prisons and penal science, in 1873. The essay paired Verzeni with another defendant Lombroso had examined, Achille Agnoletti. It reprinted his expert report, with the family history, and added the confession. The essay also circulated as a separate pamphlet, which Lombroso and Krafft-Ebing cite with different places and years (Rome 1873, Rome 1874, Florence 1873). Letters in Lombroso's archive at the University of Turin show that in February and March 1874 the editor Romolo Griffini asked him for the reports on Verzeni and Agnoletti, rewritten more clearly, for publication in the Annali universali di medicina, and that in June 1876 the Milan publisher Ulrico Hoepli asked for copies of the essay to sell.
In the essay Lombroso changed his view. Having found Verzeni responsible in court, he now argued, on the strength of the confession, that his responsibility was reduced, at least for the last part of each act, and he used the case to argue for special criminal asylums for people like him. Seminara notes that Lombroso never expressed regret that his court report had pointed the other way.
The first edition of L'uomo delinquente appeared in Milan in 1876. Verzeni appears in it many times, usually as one example in a list. Lombroso cited his skull measurements and the uneven shape of his head; his fair hair, sparse beard and heavy jaw; his family's history of pellagra and cretinism; his poor record at school; and his regular attendance at church, to show that religious practice was no protection against crime. He noted that around Bergamo, shortly after the Verzeni trial, there were two more cases of women being strangled, which he took as an example of imitation, and that he owned printed songs and stories about Verzeni of the kind sold in village squares. He also used Verzeni as an example of a criminal who prepared an alibi, accused others and held to his denials for a long time, and placed him among cases in which bloodshed was mixed with sexual desire.
In the same book Lombroso set Verzeni among the cases he used to argue that some criminals reproduce the cruelty of primitive humans and animals. In the introduction he wrote for his daughter Gina Lombroso-Ferrero's English summary of his work, published in 1911, he said that after the Villella autopsy he had been encouraged in his theory by his studies of Verzeni, whom he described as showing the instincts of the earliest cannibals and the ferocity of beasts of prey.
By the fourth edition, published in Turin in 1889, Lombroso had folded the case into a new theory: that the "born criminal" was related to the epileptic. He now wrote that Verzeni had certainly been epileptic, listed him among cases of vertigo, and said he had suffered lapses of memory. The French edition of 1887 already made the same claim, with an exclamation mark after Verzeni's name. In that French edition he also named Verzeni among defendants whom courts had found guilty though they were, in his new view, certainly mad or at least unbalanced.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, professor of psychiatry at the University of Vienna, devoted several pages of his Psychopathia Sexualis to Verzeni. In the English translation of the seventh German edition (1893), Verzeni is Case 21, introduced as the prototype of a kind of sexual murder in which the killing takes the place of intercourse. Krafft-Ebing gave the case several pages because, he wrote, it had been studied with care. He took his account from Lombroso: the charges, the two killings, the attack on the cousin, the measurements of the skull, the family history, and the confession, which he quoted at length.
Through Krafft-Ebing's book, which appeared in English in 1892 and 1893 and in French in 1895, the Bergamo case reached doctors and lawyers well beyond Italy. Krafft-Ebing's summary calls Verzeni a "modern vampire," a phrase of the period that later writers turned into a nickname.
Verzeni served his sentence in the bagno penale, the hard-labor prison, on the island of Santo Stefano. In 1893 Pasquale Penta visited him there and published a book on the case, I pervertimenti sessuali nell'uomo e Vincenzo Verzeni strangolatore di donne ("Sexual perversions in man and Vincenzo Verzeni, strangler of women"). Penta's conclusion, in the language of the period, was that the strangler was one more degenerate of the many he had studied. His book is the main source for the family details given above.
The Italian penal code of 1889 replaced the old penalties. Under it Verzeni's life sentence was converted to thirty years' imprisonment, counted from his arrest, so that he was due to be freed at about the end of 1902. People in Bottanuco were alarmed at the prospect of his return, and, partly for that reason in Seminara's reading, he was held for a period in forced residence on the island of Ventotene.
A letter in Lombroso's archive, dated March 11, 1903, shows this stage. Its writer, Federico Maironi, told Lombroso that under the new code Verzeni should have been freed rather than sent to Ventotene, that his family wanted him released, and that he himself had been asked to get the order withdrawn. He asked Lombroso for advice, because he feared that Verzeni, once free, might kill again. Lombroso's reply has not been found.
Verzeni was eventually allowed to go home. He died in Bottanuco on December 31, 1918, aged 69, according to Seminara. No source found records the cause of death or how he lived in the village during his last years.
In 1973, a century after the trial, the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia published "Processo per violenza" ("Trial for violence") in his collection Il mare colore del vino. The story retells the Verzeni trial and suggests that it was probably a miscarriage of justice, in which the court was swayed by superstition, by the popular image of an inhuman killer loose in the countryside, and by the accused man's religious habits.
Seminara's 2024 study takes Sciascia's doubt seriously. He notes that the case rested only on circumstantial evidence, with no eyewitness and no object or trace linking Verzeni to either killing, and that the evidence of his earlier attacks was in effect used to prove the murders. He suggests that Lombroso's involvement may have helped to produce the error, if error it was. Seminara does not declare Verzeni innocent; his doubts center on the reliability of the confession and on the way Lombroso obtained and used it. The conviction was final and was never overturned.
Recent Italian scholarship uses the Verzeni file to study how Lombroso worked. A 2023 study by Lorenzo Leporiere of the University of Bari reconstructs the case from published and unpublished papers and describes Verzeni as one of the most frequently cited figures in Lombroso's writings. It argues that Lombroso measured and recorded every physical detail he could find, often read those details wrongly, and then revised his theories without fully giving up the earlier ones. Seminara goes further, calling Lombroso's method, built on heredity, atavism and the measurement of skulls, a pseudo-science that drew its conclusions from prejudice rather than evidence, and linking it to the later history of racial theory.
The Verzeni case shows the pattern. Lombroso's examination in 1872 and 1873 found little to support his ideas, and he told the court so. After the confession he used the same man as evidence for atavism, then for diminished responsibility, and by 1889 for epilepsy.
The death in 1874. A widely repeated story holds that Verzeni hanged himself in prison or in an asylum in Milan in 1874. It does not survive the record. Seminara (2024) traces him to Santo Stefano, Ventotene and Bottanuco and gives his death there on December 31, 1918, and the 1903 Maironi letter in Lombroso's own archive shows him alive and in forced residence on Ventotene that year. Penta visited him in prison in 1893.
How many victims. Verzeni was convicted of two killings. Lombroso in 1876 called him the strangler of "three women," and in 1887 and 1889 wrote that he had tried to strangle seven women and killed two, placing the attacks in 1872, after his arrest. These figures do not match each other or the trial record and are not used here.
How many attempted murders. Seminara's study gives three attempted murders among the convictions; Krafft-Ebing's summary of Lombroso lists three attempts among the charges plus the August 29, 1871 attack on the cousin. The exact count of attempted-murder convictions is not settled by the sources found.
What Lombroso said he was convicted of. In 1911 Lombroso described Verzeni as convicted of "sadism and rape." He was convicted of murder and attempted murder; neither rape nor any offense called sadism was part of the verdict, and in his confession Verzeni said he had never attempted intercourse with his victims.
The confession. Verzeni denied the crimes until after sentence and then confessed to one listener. Its details are known only through Lombroso's published version. Seminara and, before him, Sciascia question how far it can be trusted.
The second victim's name. Seminara names her Elisabetta Pagnoncelli; Krafft-Ebing's summary calls her Frigeni. Both describe a married woman killed in the fields at the end of August 1871, so they appear to be the same person under different surnames.
The first attack. Seminara describes a 12-year-old cousin attacked in her bed around 1867; Krafft-Ebing's translation describes an attempt, four years before the trial, on a woman of the household who was ill in bed. These may be the same event, reported differently.
The family's means. Sciascia calls the family well off; Seminara, from the father's pellagra and Penta's account, doubts it.
April 11, 1849: Vincenzo Verzeni born in Bottanuco, province of Bergamo.
About 1861: by his later account, begins killing chickens by wringing their necks.
About 1867: first known attack, on a 12-year-old cousin, who escapes.
About 1867 or 1868: two women attacked; both escape.
1870: Lombroso's autopsy of Giuseppe Villella, the start of his theory of the born criminal.
December 8, 1870: Giovanna (Giovannina) Motta, 14, killed on her way to a nearby village. A mason is held for about two months and released.
April 1871: another woman attacked; she escapes.
August 27 or 28, 1871: Elisabetta Pagnoncelli, about 28, killed in the fields.
August 29, 1871: a 19-year-old cousin attacked in a grain field; she persuades him to let her go.
January 11, 1872: Verzeni arrested.
1872 to 1873: Lombroso examines him as the court's expert.
April 9, 1873: Corte d'Assise of Bergamo convicts him of two murders and attempted murders; life at hard labor; one juror's vote prevents a death sentence.
April 1873: Verzeni confesses privately to Lombroso.
1873: Lombroso, "Verzeni e Agnoletti," in the Rivista di discipline carcerarie.
1874: Griffini asks Lombroso for the Verzeni and Agnoletti reports for the Annali universali di medicina.
1876: Lombroso, L'uomo delinquente, first edition (Milan, Hoepli).
1887: Lombroso's L'homme criminel (French edition) presents Verzeni as epileptic.
1889: Lombroso's fourth edition recasts Verzeni as epileptic. New Italian penal code; his sentence is later converted to 30 years.
1893: English translation of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (seventh German edition) gives the case as Case 21. Pasquale Penta visits him at Santo Stefano and publishes his study.
About late 1902: sentence due to end; he is held in forced residence on Ventotene.
March 11, 1903: Federico Maironi writes to Lombroso about Verzeni's detention on Ventotene.
December 31, 1918: Verzeni dies in Bottanuco.
1973: Leonardo Sciascia publishes "Processo per violenza."
2024: Sergio Seminara's study of the trial and Lombroso's role.