Testo in italiano

Giulia Tofana: the beloved serial poisoner of husbands

by Giovanni Vallone

Giulia Tofana was an Italian professional poisoner known as history’s most prolific female poisoner who created the deadly potion, Aqua Tofana.

Information about Giulia Tofana’s background is sparse.

She was born in the early 1600 in Palermo.

Her mother may have been Thofania d’Adamo, accused of poisoning her husband, Francesco, with an arsenic concoction of her own invention, Aqua Tofana, and executed on 12 July 1633.

Giulia Tofana would have been around thirteen years old at the time of her parents’ deaths.

She spent most of her childhood in apothecaries, learning the art of herbal remedies, cosmetics, and medicine.

This is also where she would’ve learned the art of poison.

Her mother may have even passed down some of these poisonous recipes.

Giulia Tofana sold a poison called Aqua Tofana to women who wanted to murder their husbands because of domestic abuse or other forms of violence at home.

The ‘tradename’ “Manna di San Nicola” may have been a marketing device intended to divert the authorities, given that the poison was openly sold both as a cosmetic and a devotional object in vials that included a picture of St. Nicholas.

She may be responsible for the deaths of over 600 men in Italy during the 17th century.

Yet, Giulia Tofana is also considered an empathetic hero in history who helped hundreds of desperate women escape their marriages.

Aqua Tofana was a coveted face cream or oil used by Italian ladies looking to preserve their youth… or procure a status of widowhood.

Made of a mixture of lead, arsenic, and belladonna, Aqua Tofana contained some of the same ingredients as normal cosmetics at the time, which helped it to blend in on a woman’s nightstand or van

Husbands were none the wiser that their wife’s beauty regimen was their death warrant.

Giulia Tofana also gave her clients clear instructions on how to use Aqua Tofana and, most importantly, what to do after it worked.

It was a colorless, tasteless liquid and therefore easily mixed with water or wine to be served during meals.

It only took only a few drops for the effects to begin.

The discrete nature of the poison made it incredibly effective.

The victim usually started experiencing cold-like symptoms which only grew worse and worse over time.

A doctor may visit and attempt to cure the ailing husband, but by the fourth dose, he was dead.

And the husband simply looked like he died from illness… which was certainly not uncommon for the 17th century.

Giulia Tofana also coached her clients to cry, show emotion, and ask for a doctor’s examination of the body – all to avoid suspicion.

If poison is truly a woman’s weapon, no one has wielded it like Giulia Tofana.

But what’s remarkable about Tofana’s legacy is how it’s become this sort of folklore that continues to pop up throughout history.

Some fun fact about Aqua Tofana?

Mozart believed he was poisoned by it.

Upon his deathbed, Mozart said, “I feel definitely that I will not last much longer; I am sure that I have been poisoned. I cannot rid myself of this idea… Someone has given me Aqua Tofana and calculated the precise time of my death.”

Although Mozart started this rumor, the popular claim is more legend than fact.

Between 1666 and 1676, the Marchioness de Brinvilliers poisoned her father and two brothers, amongst others with the Acqua Tofana, and she was executed on July 16, 1676.

Another character involved in this story was the stepsister of Giulia, Gironima Spana who from Palermo moved to Rome officially established herself as a professional astrologer and a distributor of herbal medicine.

Gironima Spana and the Spana Prosecution are the fictionalized focus of The Book of Secrets, a historical fiction novel by British author Anna Mazzola, published by Orion Fiction in March 2024.

You asked me to talk about Giulia Tofana and how she relates to a woman called Girolama Spana.

I think I first came across Giulia Tofana in a list of female serial killers or female poisoners some years ago. When I began to research for the novel that ultimately became The Book of Secrets I realised that in fact, there was no such person as ‘Giulia Tofana’ – that during the 18th and 19th centuries various accounts and several different women had been conflated to create this legend of a notorious poisoner.

The real woman we know most about was called Girolama Spana. She was a wise woman and soothsayer who was prosecuted in 1659 together with a host of other women for making and selling poison to other women, mainly to kill abusive husbands. Girolama is one of the central characters in my book which will be published in Italy next Spring. Girolama was taught by her beloved stepmother, Giulia Mangiardi, who was born in Corleone, near Palermo and came to Rome in 1624 with her stepdaughter and with a recipe for a slow-acting arsenic-based poison. She died in 1651 before the Spana prosecution began.

There was also another woman in Palermo in the 1630s called Tofania D’Adamo who was prosecuted and ultimately executed for making and selling and arsenic-based poison – hence ‘Aqua Tofana’ or ‘Aqua Tofania’. It isn’t clear how Giulia and Tofania were connected. (Some people have said Giulia was Tofania’s daughter but a recent academic account called Black Widows of the Eternal City has put that in doubt.) Clearly women passed the precious recipe between themselves. This was a time, remember, where women had very few rights. When their every move and every decision was controlled by their male relatives. They didn’t control their own income or own property or have a choice over who they married. If they ended up in abusive marriages, they had no real way out. There was no divorce, the church was of little assistance, so an escape was sometimes found in a little bottle of clear poison. Aqua Tofana.

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Author: Giovanni Vallone, Cultural Department of Splendid Sicily

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