The study Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics by the Italian psychiatrist Enrico Agostino Morselli (1852-1929) is generally considered a major contribution to the European debate on suicide of the late decades of the nineteenth century and an important statistical source for Durkheim’s own Suicide. The rise of suicidology in nineteenth-century Italy as well as the political and intellectual context from which Morselli’s work emerged, however, have remained largely unexplored. This article sets out to deal with statistical studies on suicide in nineteenth-century Italy and, in particular, the political and intellectual context from which Morselli’s statistical work on suicide emerged. Until the second half of the nineteenth-century, suicide in the Italian Peninsula was an uncharted phenomenon. It became the object of statistical study in the troubled years that followed the unification of the country, within a wider context characterized by concerns for the country’s cultural and economic fragmentation, and for the high rates of violent crime and illiteracy that relegated Italy to the edge of civilized Europe.