A long cruel history

The museum covers the thousands-years-old history of punishments and the death penalty through reconstructions and period pieces

The museum gathers both original and reconstructed torture devices and death penalty instruments. It allows visitors to explore the technologies and the brutalities of the past centuries with the aid of fact sheets, incisions, prints and paintings of the time.

These tools were gathered throughout all Europe. Some of them are extremely rare and date back to the 16th and 17th century, or are philological reconstructions of old and unobtainable objects from the 1800s or 1900s. Some machines are less known, but they show, with their sophistication, how the human imagination has had absolutely no borders in the search for ways to inflict pain onto others.

The historical and artistic heritage of the Society includes weapons, torture instruments and devices for the death penalty and for public humiliation, as well as incisions, prints and paintings of the time. The museum offers explanatory notes in various languages: Italian, English, French, German, Spanish, Portoguese and Japanese.