Did a female serial poisoner kill hundreds of men in Renaissance Italy?
For centuries, Giulia Tofana was remembered as a notorious serial poisoner who helped wives murder their husbands. Newly examined historical records tell a far more complicated story.
For some men in 17th-century Italy, death arrived stealthily. What would begin as a vague sense of malaise would steadily worsen over the course of days or weeks. Stomach pains, vomiting, fever, and extreme thirst were common symptoms of the mystery illness that doctors struggled to explain. What was certain, however, was that it was always fatal.
According to legend, the culprit was a poison so subtle it left no trace—tasteless, colorless, and nearly impossible to detect. Its name was Aqua Tofana.
Believed to have been named after the recipe’s creator, Giulia Tofana, Aqua Tofana was said to have been manufactured and distributed by a clandestine female crime syndicate operating in Palermo, Sicily, and Rome. Hidden in cosmetic jars and perfume bottles, the deadly liquid was allegedly sold to wives who used it to kill hundreds of unsuspecting husbands.
Tofana helmed the group until, depending on the version of the story, she either retired to a convent or was captured and executed.
The myth surrounding the poison and its maker has endured for hundreds of years, and even today Tofana and her eponymous elixir are the subject of blogs, historical fiction, and internet memes. It’s easy to see why: an undetectable poison, homicidal housewives, and a female serial killer make for a tantalizing tale.
“From the very start, the story of the acquetta captured the imagination, spawning a wealth of narratives that have accumulated and survived across the centuries,” Simona Feci, a legal history professor at the Università di Napoli L’Orientale, remarks in her book, L’acquetta di Giulia.
However, the true story is a bit more nuanced. Untangling it requires moving beyond the myth—into court records, execution lists, and fragments of the lives of ordinary women who left few traces behind.
Who was Giulia Tofana?
Much of the truth behind the legend has, until recently, been locked away in Rome’s state archives, including a transcript from the investigation into five women accused of running a poison network in Rome in the mid-1600s and their subsequent conviction and execution. However, according to historians who have studied these documents, Giulia Tofana isn’t among the condemned.
In an interview, Feci confirmed what some historians had long suspected: the law never caught up with Giulia Tofana, who was actually named Giulia Mangiardi. According to her death certificate, she died in Rome in 1651 at the age of 70 from what Feci and other historians presume was natural causes.
So why the name Tofana? Some historians believe that the moniker can be traced to an infamous poisoner named Thofania d’Adamo—also known as La Tofania—who had been active in Palermo before being convicted and executed for poisoning her husband. Several published claims have reported that Mangiardi was d’Adamo’s daughter, but contemporary historians, including Feci, argue that there is no evidence that the women were related. Even so, Giulia Mangiardi is more commonly known as Giulia Tofana.
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Another misconception is that Mangiardi functioned solely as a professional poisoner for hire. Born in what was then called Coriglione, Sicily, she earned her living as a wise woman, healer, and marriage broker. She offered fortune-telling, homemade cosmetics, skin creams, and love potions, and arranged marriages and property transactions for clients who included members of Rome’s aristocracy. While historians believe she inherited the recipe for Aqua Tofana and occasionally sold it, the poison was only one part of a much broader business.
Rome’s underground network
According to historian Mike Dash, Mangiardi and the women who followed in her footsteps were part of a “criminal magical underworld,” active in Italy during the 17th century. Members of this loose underground economy ranged from apothecaries to astrologers to, as Dash puts it, “dubious clerics who freelanced as black magicians.”
“They probably didn’t start out as poisoners at all,” says Dash. “They were people who offered various services to women who wanted to know the future, deal with small issues in their lives, and so on. Murder is the very far end of that range of services.”
Although she was able to operate under the radar of the authorities, Mangiardi’s activities occasionally raised suspicions. In his book, The Black Widows of the Eternal City, Craig Monson reports that Mangiardi had developed a reputation for practicing witchcraft, since marriage brokers were often believed to harness the dark arts in order to form successful unions. Her abrupt move from Palermo to Rome with her second husband and stepdaughters from her previous marriage in 1624—following the suspicious death of a man whose maid claimed Mangiardi may have been involved in—only fueled those rumors.
Despite the whispers surrounding her, Mangiardi’s business endured. Among those who learned her trade was her stepdaughter, Gironima Spana, who would eventually inherit both her clientele and, historians believe, the poison trade. Working with two other women—including Giovanna de Grandis—and relying on a renegade priest to obtain arsenic, Spana oversaw a network that brewed Aqua Tofana, sold it through two trusted intermediaries, and quietly distributed it across Rome.
Several members of Spana’s network appear to have known one another through Mangiardi’s work as a marriage broker or through Rome’s underground folk-magic circles. However, historians cannot reconstruct every relationship. Mangiardi had once acted as a marriage broker for de Grandis, and Spana had reportedly befriended another member during a by-chance meeting. Several of the women were widows, and all of them struggled financially.
Spana herself had a fairly prosperous childhood, before her stepfather squandered the family’s fortune. By adulthood, however, her business activities allowed her to maintain a comfortable townhouse with a large garden near the banks of the Tiber and to retain a housemaid who had served the family since Spana’s childhood.
Just as Mangiardi, Spana, and their associates weren’t primarily poisoners, the majority of clients who approached them for a flask or so of their deadly potion weren’t leading lives of crime. They were the wives of butchers, linen sellers, and dyers—”very normal, ordinary women,” according to Feci.
Some of these would-be widows had been married off as teenagers to much older men who squandered their dowries. Others were subjected to ongoing physical abuse and threats. And some just wanted out. In highly patriarchal 17th-century Italy, marriages were arranged, and divorce was practically nonexistent. On the rare occasion that an annulment was granted, the woman in question faced ostracization and scorn. For a Renaissance-era woman with no legal or economic recourse, poison functioned as a last-resort solution to stifling and at times dangerous domestic situations.
The chemistry of Aqua Tofana
Although the exact recipe has never been recovered, historians agree that Aqua Tofana was primarily an arsenic poison. Contemporary accounts suggest it was sold under several names—including Aqua della Toffnina and Acquetta di Napoli. Some historians report that lead was added to the brew, which was boiled before being bottled and sold in liquid form. Others have speculated that the mixture included antimony and belladonna.
Acute arsenic poisoning can cause death within 24 hours of ingestion, and Spana and her gang must have known this. To avert suspicion, they instructed would-be widows to dispense the poison gradually over a one- or two-week period. Some women would even stop administering the lethal elixir for a day or so—long enough for a husband’s condition to slightly improve—before continuing to add several drops to his evening wine or soup. The wife in question would also seek help from multiple doctors, who were as baffled as she appeared to be about the cause of her spouse’s mysterious malady.
One enduring legend claims Aqua Tofana was sold as cosmetics, and this is partially true. Cosmetics jars were typically used as an ingenious way to keep the toxic liquid hidden in plain sight. The poison was also reportedly stored in small bottles labeled “Manna of Saint Nicholas.” Ironically, the latter normally contained holy water from the crypt of Saint Nicholas of Bari that was believed to have curative properties.
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Eventually, secrecy gave way to suspicion, and the authorities eventually did catch on. What began as whispered rumors in the alleys of Rome ended in a sting orchestrated by the city’s lieutenant governor that caught de Grandis in the act of offering to procure poison for a bogus client. De Grandis was hauled off to prison, interrogated under torture, and confessed. A short time later, three other members of Spana’s gang were rounded up. Like de Grandis, they also confessed.
Gironima Spana, however, denied involvement until the end. Even after her longtime housemaid testified against her, she never cracked. Nevertheless, Spana, de Grandis, and three other members of her network were found guilty of brewing, distributing, and trafficking in poison, and were hanged in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori in July of 1659 before massive crowds.
No one knows for certain exactly how many men were victims of the aquetta. Historians have dismissed claims that the network of poisoners took out hundreds of men as exaggerated, and Dash notes that some deaths attributed to poison may instead have resulted from the many diseases circulating in 17th-century Rome, including the plague epidemic that overlapped with the network’s activities.
The making of a folk heroine
As for the women who were accused of using the poison on the men in their lives, only one faced the gallows. Two were granted papal immunity in exchange for their testimonies, and the others were banished from the city. Three of those exiled had their sentences remitted.
It has been more than 350 years since Giulia Mangiardi died and Gironima Spana and her associates met their end, but their legends endure. Recent historical novels, including Cathryn Kemp’s A Poisoner’s Tale, are indicative of how the story continues to resonate in the modern imagination. A cursory Google search turns up various mentions of Aqua Tofana, and Aqua Tofana Apothecary sweatshirts can be purchased on Etsy.
In the contemporary myth of “Giulia Tofana,” the serial poisoner has emerged as something of a feminist folk hero. In A Poisoner’s Tale, for instance, Tofana is reimagined as an altruistic rescuer who supplies poison to wives trapped in violent marriages. “Giulia Tofana—Serial killer or Heroine?!” asks a blog post on the U.K.-based National Centre for Domestic Violence. Hint: the post suggests that she was the latter.
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Last year, the State Archives of Rome presented a play in its Renaissance-era Sala Alessandrina that described the Aqua Tofana as “a story of crime, love, female solidarity, and deception.” The summary has the whiff of a romantic fable that belies the desperation, whether financial or marital, behind the criminal actions of the poison makers and the women who purchased their potions.
“When I began looking into the Roman poisoners, I didn’t first encounter documents or facts, but a legend: Giulia Tofana,” Feci writes in her book.
Giulia, she adds, is less a real person than “a mask.” A character kept alive over the centuries by the fascination she continues to inspire.
