Giovanni Marro

Giovanni Marro (29 May 1875 – 20 July 1952) was an Italian physician and anthropologist.

Biography

Giovanni Marro was born in Limone Piemonte, the son of Antonio Marro (1840–1913) and Maddalena Viale. His father was an eminent psychologist and close collaborator of Cesare Lombroso. His brother Andrea Marro was a distinguished surgeon. After graduating in medicine and surgery from the University of Turin, he specialised in psychiatry, supplementing it with research in physical anthropology. He was initiated into Freemasonry in the Fides Lodge in Rivoli (Turin) and became Master Mason on 29 June 1908.

In 1923, he taught a course of general anthropology, which became the chair of anthropology in 1940. Marro began working in the psychiatric hospital in Collegno, before becoming the director of the Anatomy Laboratory attached to the former asylum in 1938.

In addition to caring for the health of patients in the Collegno hospital, he also devoted himself to involving them in creative activities by producing various artefacts, which were then collected and studied by Marro himself. This production, known as 'paranoid art' or 'art of the insane', later called 'rough art', formed one of the collections of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the University of Turin, which he founded in 1926, first at Palazzo Carignano and later at the Palazzo dell'Ospedale San Giovanni Vecchio.

He undertook to enrich the collections of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in Turin with hundreds of skeletons of ancient Egyptians from the excavations of archaeological missions in which he himself participated: in 1911 at the invitation of Professor Ernesto Schiaparelli and from 1930 to 1935 on his own. If his published works represented an irreplaceable and sometimes unique documentation of Schiaparelli's excavations, his research constituted an innovative meeting point between humanistic and scientific disciplines and contributed to the birth of an Egyptological anthropology with biological-naturalistic connotations.

At the same time, Marro collected many hundreds of letters and documents once owned by Bernardino Drovetti. He published one volume of Drovetti's papers, but before the second volume was published, Marro died. These documents were later donated to the Academy of Sciences in Turin and are part of the Drovetti fund.

In 1929, he discovered a large complex of rock engravings in Val Camonica, on which he published various works on palethnology and had several photographic, drawing and plaster copies produced to be kept at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in Turin. In 1933 Marro discovered near Breno a Bronze Age ax; and other bronze tools were recovered at other spots in the Valley and are now collected in a local museum.

During the Fascist period, he published numerous contributions in support of the concept of race and supported the government racial laws. In 1939, he was called upon to curate the exhibition The Hall of Race at the Promotrice delle Belle Arti in the Valentino Park in Turin, on the occasion of the exhibition Turin and Autarchy. Enzo Leoni, one of Marro's most important disciples, insisted as late as 1941 that National Socialist racialism was "antithetical" to that of Fascism.

Following the fall of the fascist regime, he was dismissed from the University of Turin only to be reinstated as a lecturer three years before his death.

Giovanni Marro was Knight and later Commander of the Order of the Crown of Italy.

Works

• "Sur la division de l’os propre du Nez. Observations originales sur des Crânes de Criminels et d’Aliénés," Archivio di Antropologia Criminale, Psichiatria e Medicina Legale, Vol. XXVIII (1907), pp. 633–74.
• "Osservazioni morfologiche ed osteometriche sopra lo scheletro degli Egiziani antichi: [necropoli di Assiut 2500-3000 av. Cr., Parte prima," Rivista di antropologia, Vol. XVIII (1913)
• Il profilo della faccia negli Egiziani antichi: [necropoli di Assiut, 2500-3000 av. Cr.] (1915)
• "Sulla psicologia dell’antico Egitto," Atti della Reale Accademia delle scienze di Torino, Vol. LV (1919/20)
• Les nécropoles égyptiennes et les fouilles de la Mission archéologique italienne (1921)
• "Bernardino Drovetti et Champollion le 'Jeune'," Atti della R. Accademia delle scienze di Torino, Vol. LVIII (1922/23), pp. 548–82.
• "II Giuda impiccato del Canavesio (secolo XV) in 'Nostra Signora del Fontano': Analisi naturalistica," Archivio di Antropologia Criminale, Psichiatria e Medicina Legale, Vol. XLV (1925), pp. 3–24.
• Il corpo e la statua del defunto nell’Egitto antico: contributo alla psicologia dei popoli (1927)
• L’esplorazione della necropoli di Gebelen: [dai lavori della Missione archeologica italiana in Egitto] (1929)
• La nuova scoperta di incisioni preistoriche in Val Camonica (1930/31)
• Scavi italiani in Egitto e loro scopo anthropologico (1931)
• "Del «Seppellimento secondario» nell’antico Egitto," Atti del VII convegno di psicologia sperimentale e psicotecnica (1931)
• "Dell'istoriazione Rupestre di Valcamonica," Memorie dell'Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, Vol. LXVII (1933)
• "Documenti inediti sulla cessione al Piemonte della collezione egiziana Drovetti," Atti della R. Accademia delle scienze di Torino, Vol. LXIX (1933/34), pp. 595–617.
• Sull’antropologia e sull’etnografia dell’Egitto predinastico (1936)
• La sala della razza nella rassegna «Torino e l’autarchia»: 1939-XVIII (1939)
• Caratteri fisici e spirituali della razza italiana (1939)
• L’istituto e Museo di antropologia e di etnografia di Torino. Dalla sua fondazione nella Regia Università [1926-IV] (1940)
• Primato della razza italiana: confronto di morfologia biologia antropogeografia e di civiltà (1940)
• I fattori biologici e geografici del destino storico d’Italia (1940)
• "La personalità di B. Drovetti studiata nel suo archivio inedito," Memorie della R. Acc. delle scienze di Torino, Vol. LXXI (1951), pp. 39–151.
• "B. Drovetti archeologo," Aegyptus, Vol. XXXII (1952), pp. 121–30.

References

• Cassata, Francesco (2011). "Eugenics and Racism (1938–1943)." In: Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy. Central European University Press, pp. 223–84.
• Hawthorne, Camilla (2022). "Mediterrabeanism, Africa, and the Racial Borders of Italianness." In: Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean. Ithaka, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 91–124.
• Gillette, Aaron (2002). Racial Theories in Fascist Italy. London: Routledge.
• Rabino Massa, Emma (2007). "Giovanni Marro." In: Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Vol. 70. Roma: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana.
• Revelli, Nuto; John Penuel (2013). "Around the World like a Bunch of Marmots: Giovanni Marro." In: Mussolini’s Death March: Eyewitness Accounts of Italian Soldiers on the Eastern Front. University Press of Kansas, pp. 166–71.

External links

• Marro, Giovanni
• Works by Giovanni Marro at JSTOR
• Works by Giovanni Marro at Persée
• Works by Giovanni Marro at Internet Archive