Among the museum's most prominent exhibits stands the skull of brigand Giuseppe Vilella, the original inspiration for professor Cesare Lombroso's fanciful theory of criminal atavism. Vilella, not really a bandit by trade as much as a poor man from Motta Santa Lucia who scraped by with small-time larceny, died in Pavia's jails in 1879, at the age of sixty-nine. While performing the required autopsy, Lombroso noticed some oddities in Vilella's occipital bone: from this observation he started developing his hypothesis that crime is already "coded" into individual anatomy, later most famously coming to include somatic features.