Behind the walls of the old hospital in Lodi lies one of Italy’s most disturbing and fascinating scientific collections. Inside glass cases are human hands, heads, organs and entire bodies prepared more than a century ago. They have not been preserved in formaldehyde, frozen by modern machinery or transformed into wax models. They are real anatomical specimens treated by a secret chemical process that made organic tissues dry, resistant and almost as hard as stone. The man responsible was Paolo Gorini, a mathematician, geologist, patriot and self-taught anatomical researcher whom the inhabitants of Lodi nicknamed “the Wizard.” He spent much of his life searching for ways to defeat decomposition. Then, in an extraordinary reversal, he became one of Europe’s most important pioneers of cremation.
Paolo Giuseppe Antonio Enrico Gorini was born in Pavia on 28 January 1813. His father, Giovanni Gorini, taught mathematics at the University of Pavia, while his mother, Martina Pelloli, came from Lodi. Paolo grew up in an educated family, but his childhood was marked by tragedy. In 1825 his father died after being struck by a carriage, leaving the twelve-year-old boy in a financially precarious situation. With assistance from some of his father’s academic colleagues, Gorini continued his studies at the prestigious Collegio Ghislieri and graduated in mathematics from the University of Pavia. His education was rigorous, but his intellectual curiosity could not be confined to a single subject. Mathematics led him towards physics; physics towards geology; geology towards chemistry and, eventually, towards the mysteries of the human body.
In 1834, when he was only twenty-one, Gorini moved to Lodi to teach physics and natural sciences at the local municipal high school. The Lombard city would become his home, laboratory and eventually the place most closely associated with his unusual experiments. Gorini was not a conventional academic working inside a wealthy university. He operated with limited resources, often constructing his own instruments and developing theories through private experiments. His ideas moved freely across scientific disciplines, sometimes producing remarkable practical results and sometimes leading him towards theories that modern science would reject.
The Man Who Tried to Build Volcanoes
Long before becoming famous for preserving human bodies, Gorini was fascinated by the formation of mountains and volcanoes. He believed that geological processes could be reproduced on a small scale inside a laboratory. Using mixtures of waxes, resins, sulphur and other substances, he heated and cooled materials to observe how pressure might create cracks, ridges and miniature volcanic formations.
These experiments attracted considerable attention. Visitors came to see artificial landscapes apparently growing before their eyes. Gorini published his ideas in works devoted to the origin of volcanoes and earthquakes, hoping that experimental geology would earn him a permanent university position.
His models were ingenious, but his broader geological theories were not confirmed by later research. Plate tectonics, still unknown during Gorini’s lifetime, would eventually provide a much more accurate explanation for the formation of mountains, earthquakes and volcanoes. Nevertheless, his attempt to recreate geological phenomena experimentally was remarkably imaginative for its time.
The relationship between rocks and living tissues may appear strange, but in Gorini’s mind the two investigations were connected. While studying how minerals formed and changed, he began to wonder whether organic matter could also be stabilised, transformed and protected from decay.
Around 1842, he started developing chemical preparations capable of preserving animal and human tissues.
Why Nineteenth-Century Science Needed Bodies
To understand Gorini’s work, it is necessary to forget modern refrigeration, medical imaging and professionally produced anatomical models. Nineteenth-century doctors and students learned anatomy through dissections and preserved human remains. Medical schools needed specimens demonstrating healthy organs, injuries, deformities and diseases. Artists also studied anatomical preparations to understand muscles and the structure of the human body.
Preserving those specimens was extremely difficult. Decomposition began rapidly, particularly during warm weather, and the chemical solutions available at the time were often unreliable, unpleasant or dangerous. Formaldehyde did not enter widespread use until after Gorini’s most important experiments.
Scientists across Europe searched for better techniques. Some dried bodies; others immersed them in alcohol or injected preserving liquids through their blood vessels. The most ambitious researchers attempted mineralisation, replacing or saturating organic tissues with substances that prevented their destruction.
Gorini was not the first Italian to pursue this dream. Girolamo Segato, an explorer and naturalist from Belluno, had already produced remarkably preserved anatomical specimens using a secret process often described as petrification. Segato died in 1836 without revealing his complete formula.
Gorini effectively began his own search from the beginning.
The First Complete Body
One of Gorini’s earliest full-body preparations was that of Pasquale Barbieri, a young man from Lodi who died in 1843. The body remains part of the collection associated with the scientist.
Gorini’s methods varied according to the result he wanted to obtain. Some specimens were immersed in preserving solutions. More advanced preparations involved draining the body and injecting chemicals deeply into the circulatory system through major arteries and veins. The treatment could be lengthy, complicated and expensive.
The expression “turned bodies to stone” is therefore dramatic but not entirely literal. Gorini did not transform flesh into geological rock. His chemicals dehydrated, disinfected and stabilised tissues until they became extremely firm, light and resistant to decomposition. Hair, facial features and other external characteristics could remain recognisable.
Because he kept his formulas secret, rumours spread around Lodi. People imagined hidden nighttime experiments, bodies transported through dark streets and mysterious substances capable of stopping death itself. He became known as il Mago di Lodi, the Wizard of Lodi.
The nickname made him sound like an occult figure, but Gorini considered himself a scientist. He was not attempting to resurrect anyone, nor did he claim to possess supernatural powers. His objective was to control the physical process that begins after death.
The Secret Inside the Laboratory
For many years, Gorini guarded his formulas jealously. Secrecy was common among nineteenth-century anatomical preparators because an effective preservation technique could bring prestige, academic opportunities and financial rewards.
Documents rediscovered and studied in Lodi in the early twenty-first century revealed at least part of his method. Some preparations involved compounds based on mercury chloride and calcium chloride. These substances were highly toxic but effective at preventing microbial activity and altering the structure of organic tissue.
There was not necessarily one universal “Gorini formula.” He appears to have used different solutions and procedures depending on the specimen, its condition and the type of preservation required. This explains why objects in the surviving collection do not all look or feel the same.
Some are dried anatomical preparations intended to demonstrate particular medical conditions. Others are mineralised specimens that preserve the external appearance of the deceased. The collection includes examples of tumours, skeletal deformities, hernias and congenital differences. These were produced in a period when displaying real human remains was considered an essential part of medical education.
The results can be unsettling to modern visitors, but they should not be treated as a horror attraction. They belong to the history of medicine and demonstrate the lengths to which researchers went to preserve anatomical knowledge before the invention of modern technology. The surviving collection contains preparations made between 1843 and 1881 and is housed in the former chapter house of Lodi’s Old Hospital.
A Scientist and a Revolutionary
Gorini’s life was also connected with the Italian Risorgimento. He supported liberal and patriotic causes during a period when Lombardy formed part of the Austrian Empire. Following the Five Days of Milan in 1848, when the city rose against Austrian rule, his political involvement forced him to leave temporarily for Switzerland.
This aspect of his life is important because it placed him within a circle of doctors, intellectuals and political activists who wanted to modernise Italy. Science, public hygiene, secular education and national independence were often seen as parts of the same struggle against the old order.
Among Gorini’s important connections was Agostino Bertani, a physician, patriot and associate of Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi. It was through Bertani that Gorini received the most famous and delicate assignment of his career.
In March 1872, Giuseppe Mazzini died in Pisa.
What Gorini Really Did to Giuseppe Mazzini
Popular accounts frequently state that Gorini petrified Giuseppe Mazzini. The reality is more complicated.
Mazzini died on 10 March 1872 while living secretly in Pisa under the assumed name of George Brown. His body had already been dead for approximately two days when Gorini arrived. Decomposition had begun, making a complete mineralisation according to Gorini’s preferred method impossible.
Gorini treated the body to disinfect it, stop further putrefaction and allow it to be displayed. He never claimed that he had successfully transformed Mazzini into stone. The process instead produced a form of gradual mummification.
Mazzini’s body was transported to Genoa and displayed before burial, allowing thousands of people to pay their respects. It was later placed in the monumental cemetery of Staglieno. When the remains were examined in 1946, the body was found to be substantially preserved, demonstrating that Gorini’s intervention had been effective even though it was not a true example of his most advanced mineralisation technique.
The assignment made his name known throughout Italy. He was no longer merely the eccentric scientist from Lodi. He had become the man entrusted with preserving the body of one of the principal figures of Italian unification.
The Successful Preservation of Giuseppe Rovani
Gorini obtained a better result with Giuseppe Rovani, the Milanese novelist, critic and intellectual who died in 1874. Because Gorini could begin the preparation sooner and under more favourable circumstances, the treatment was more successful.
Rovani’s body was preserved with its recognisable external features and publicly displayed before burial in Milan’s Monumental Cemetery. Contemporary observers were impressed and disturbed by the realism of the result.
The success brought Gorini international fame, but it also forced him to confront a practical problem. His preservation process was too complicated and costly to be used for the general population. A society could not permanently preserve every human body. Cemeteries were already becoming overcrowded as European cities expanded.
Gorini joked that if everyone were preserved, the dead would eventually outnumber and overwhelm the living.
His attention therefore moved from preserving bodies to destroying them cleanly and rapidly.
From Petrification to Cremation
At first, the change appears completely contradictory. After spending decades fighting the destruction of the human body, Gorini began designing machines to reduce it to ashes. In reality, both projects came from the same obsession: his profound dislike of putrefaction.
Traditional burial allowed decomposition to continue slowly underground. Gorini considered this process unhygienic, unpleasant and needlessly prolonged. Cremation offered an alternative that was rapid, controlled and, in his opinion, more dignified.
He began experimenting with furnace designs during the 1870s. His objective was to create an apparatus capable of producing a complete cremation without the excessive smoke, smell or partially burned remains associated with primitive systems.
His design used carefully directed flames and a secondary combustion system to burn residues and smoke. It was efficient for its time and required approximately two hours to complete a cremation.
The first Gorinian crematorium was built in 1877 at the cemetery of Riolo, near Lodi. During the night between 5 and 6 September, the first cremation using the installation was completed.
Gorini did not invent the general concept of cremation, and another modern furnace had already been used at Milan’s Monumental Cemetery in 1876. His contribution was the development of an influential and practical system that was subsequently adopted or adapted in several cities.
Gorinian crematoria were installed in places including Milan, Cremona, Rome, Varese and Turin. His work also influenced installations abroad, including the crematorium at Père-Lachaise in Paris and the pioneering facility at Woking in England.
The Final Paradox
Gorini spent his life exploring two opposite possibilities: making the body survive almost indefinitely or making it disappear rapidly through fire. Yet both paths reflected the same desire to place death under rational and scientific control.
His work also tells us something about nineteenth-century Europe. It was a period suspended between ancient funeral traditions and modern medicine, between religious authority and secular science, between popular superstition and experimental research.
To the inhabitants of Lodi, Gorini remained a mysterious figure. His laboratory, chemicals and preserved bodies inspired suspicion, curiosity and fear. To doctors and reformers, however, he represented progress. His anatomical preparations provided useful educational material, while his furnace helped make modern cremation technically practical.
Despite the attention he received, Gorini never achieved the stable academic recognition he desired. His proposal for a university chair in experimental geology was not accepted. He continued working with limited resources and died in Lodi on 2 February 1881, only a few days after his sixty-eighth birthday.
In accordance with the principles he had defended, his body was cremated. The man who had learned how to preserve the dead chose not to preserve himself.
The Legacy of the Wizard of Lodi
The Paolo Gorini Anatomical Collection was formally established as a museum collection in 1981, a century after his death. It is housed within Lodi’s historic Old Hospital and preserves approximately two hundred anatomical preparations connected with his research.
Modern scientific examinations continue to study the materials and techniques he used. His work offers information about the history of anatomy, chemistry, pathology and funeral reform. It also raises ethical questions about the treatment and exhibition of human remains—questions that nineteenth-century scientists considered very differently from researchers and museum visitors today.
Paolo Gorini was neither a magician nor the monstrous figure suggested by sensational legends. He was an eccentric and imperfect scientist working at the frontier of what his century understood about chemistry, disease and decomposition. Some of his theories failed, while some of his practical inventions travelled far beyond Lodi.
His preserved specimens remain behind glass, silent evidence of a man who believed that even death could be studied, controlled and transformed.
He could make the dead endure like stone. He could also make them disappear in an aureole of heat and light. Between those two extremes lies the remarkable and unsettling story of Paolo Gorini—the scientist who dedicated his life not to defeating death, but to defeating decay.