History Fix

Ep. 71 Aqua Tofana: How A Ring of Female Serial Killers Liberated Italian Women

• Shea LaFountaine

Share episode

This episode explores the famed poison, Aqua Tofana, that desperate housewives used to murder their husbands in 17th century Italy. I'll delve into the legend of Giulia Tofana, the apparent namesake behind the poison who was supposedly responsible for the deaths of 600 men in the mid 1600s and do my best to separate fact from fiction to uncover what in the world was going on in Italy and, more importantly, why. 

Sources: 

Support the show! 

Shoot me a message!

When you think of someone being poisoned, it’s not pretty. You’re likely picturing someone gagging, retching, they are violently ill, their eyes bloodshot perhaps, maybe they fall to the floor, begin to convulse. In a matter of minutes, they are dead, foamy spittle trickling from the corners of their mouth while horrified dinner guests look on in shock. That’s being poisoned, right? But what if there was a poison that could be ingested discreetly, without all the drama and retching and convulsing? What if the poisoned dinner attendee finished his meal and went on his way feeling perfectly fine, had dessert even. He carried on with his life for a week, or a month, maybe even a year, that was up to the poisoner. Then he became ill. It was subtle at first, like he was catching a bug, fatigue, body aches, lethargy. This illness progressed slowly and in a natural way to abdominal pain, vomiting, dysentery, and eventually death. Autopsies would find nothing. Doctors would claim he had died of some unknown natural illness, and his wife, now a widow, would collect her inheritance and move on with her life. This was Aqua Tofana, a tasteless, odorless, colorless, slow acting, extremely effective poison that first appeared in Italy in the 1630s. But, did you know, Aqua Tofana was created by women and used by women for a very particular purpose? Let’s fix that. 


Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. This topic suggestion came through Instagram, well sort of, not Aqua Tofana specifically but Giulia Tofana. Giulia was a woman living in 17th century Rome who gained a reputation as a prolific poisoner, providing poison to women who wanted to murder their husbands. According to the legend, Giulia Tofana developed the poison, Aqua Tofana, which is why it bears her name. Also according to the legend, she was responsible for the deaths of more than 600 men. So I’m like “oh my gosh, amazing, this sounds super interesting, let’s go.” But this suggestion sort of gave me a run for my money, to be honest. Because what I found when I started to research was that the story of Giulia Tofana is mostly an urban legend with very little evidence to back it up. It’s a fun story, but is it actual history? Well, it’s both. But there’s a lot more to it than what’s in the legend. So much so that I actually went back after researching and changed the name of this episode from Giulia Tofana to Aqua Tofana. 


I think the reason this story has taken on such a mythic, urban legendy vibe is because we know so very little about what actually happened that people have filled in the blanks throughout the years. And we know so little about what happened because this story is about women in the 1600s in Italy, and not like wealthy or famous or ruling class women. Average, ordinary women. A clandestine group of average, ordinary women to muddle things even further. There are few reliable records of what happened because women in 17th century Rome were inconsequential, barely viewed as human, much less citizens with any sort of rights. Dealings with women simply were not recorded by the men, who were the only ones writing things down. And this situation, honestly, is part of the reason why these women wanted Aqua Tofana in the first place. 


Let me set the stage for you. Women in Italy in the 1600s were viewed as property of their husbands. They had no rights, no protection from the law. Their husbands could do whatever they wanted to them and face no consequences. On top of that, marriages were mostly business arrangements. There was no love involved in many of these relationships. A father made a business arrangement with a suitor and his daughter was married off to someone she didn’t even know. So women basically had three options. Get married and just hope you got a good one in an incredibly misogynistic society, stay single and resort to prostitution to support yourself, or become a widow, inherit your late husband’s fortune and live your life liberated and in relative comfort. For women trapped in abusive relationships, the widow option looked pretty good. But in order to become a widow, your husband must die and for abused women who were desperate enough, there was a seemingly foolproof way to make that happen - Aqua Tofana and the apothecary credited with its creation - Giulia Tofana. Historian Mike Dash says in an article I’ll mention soon, quote “The very existence of Aqua Tofana was, thus, a severe challenge to what was then agreed to be the natural order – a world in which men ruled as petty tyrants over their own families, and even the most aristocratic of daughters were chattels to be auctioned off into often loveless marriages,” end quote. 


So I’m going to start with the legend. This is the story you will read over and over again if you Google Giulia Tofana. But you’ll notice that the websites that pop up in that Google search, they aren’t super reputable. No History.com, no Smithsonian Magazine, no Encyclopedia Britannica, no National Library of Medicine, no academic journals - none of these well established sources are reporting this story. And that’s because it’s just that, a story, with very little proof and certain parts that are almost certainly wrong. But there is one guy, Mike Dash who I quoted a minute ago. He is an author, historian, and researcher who so super thoroughly delves into any shred of truth behind the Giulia Tofana story and I’m going to be referencing his article about it pretty heavily in this episode because he does such a fantastic job of looking at actual reports and any potential evidence to sort of get to the bottom of what is true and what is legend. But let’s start with the legend. Here’s how it goes. 


Giulia Tofana was born in Palermo, Sicily in 1620. Her mother, a woman by the name of Teofania di Adamo, was executed for poisoning her husband in 1633. Some accounts say that Teofania was the one who developed the poison, aqua tofana, and passed the knowledge of how to make it down to her daughter. Other accounts say Giulia was the one who came up with the poison, obviously inspired by her mother’s role as a poisoner. Either way, Giulia started an apothecary which is like a shop that sells medicines, and tinctures, and tonics and that sort of thing. But Giulia mostly sold cosmetics, powders, and face creams, balms and ointments meant to heal blemishes, even skin tone, enhance a woman’s beauty. That’s what people thought she did anyway. That’s what her business looked like on the outside. But what she really did was run an underground ring that peddled black market poisons. Giulia felt for women trapped in abusive or loveless marriages, women who had no control over their own lives. So she helped them escape. She gave them a way out. 


Aqua Tofana was a face cream or an oil that was meant to, you know, make your skin look more youthful or whatever, heal blemishes. It came in a bottle or a powder case that was labeled “Manna of St. Nicholas Bari.” And this was supposed to be a quote “miraculous healing oil that supposedly sweated from the saint’s bones [that would be St. Nicholas] in far off Bari.” So, um, that’s insane that that’s what people thought they were buying. But in real life, it supposedly contained arsenic, lead, and belladonna, all of which are poisonous and all of which were commonly used in cosmetics that women slathered all over their faces. Please refer to episode 15, Toxic Beauty, if you would like to know more about that. So it wasn’t actually weird that women had straight up poison on their vanity tables. Poison was a common ingredient in actual cosmetic products. That all checked out. 


According to the legend, Giulia worked with a ring of associates, including her own daughter, a small group of trusted women, and possibly a priest. And this group helped her supply Aqua Tofana to Italian women and instructed them on how to use it to slowly and discreetly murder their husbands such that, number one, there would be no suspicion of poison and, number two, the husband would have time to get his affairs in order, finalize his will, keeping in mind his doting wife caring for him at his bedside around the clock. 


Giulia’s business flourished. She was careful to only sell to women that she trusted or women that could be vouched for by someone that she trusted. But, according to the legend, one of these women got cold feet just as she was about to administer the Aqua Tofana to murder her husband. She had mixed a few drops into his bowl of soup before serving it to him. But just before he took a bite, she panicked, and begged him not to eat the soup. The truth came out - she had put poison in the soup and she had gotten it from Giulia Tofana’s apothecary. The husband reported Giulia to the police but, beloved by the women of Rome, she was given advance warning of her impending arrest and was able to escape to a church where she was given sanctuary. But then, a rumor began to spread that Giulia had poisoned the city’s water supply. This elevated the whole thing. This was a much bigger deal now. So the police busted into the church and arrested Giulia. 


She was tortured into confessing that she had facilitated the murders of around 600 men and was executed in 1651, some reports say by strangulation which seems insane considering that is an incredibly difficult and intimate way to kill someone. Her daughter and her inner ring of female associates were also executed. Over 40 of Giulia’s lower class customers were executed, these were women who had purchased Aqua Tofana from her and used it to poison their husbands. Some of her more upper class customers were imprisoned but most escaped punishment altogether because money’s got it like that. 


So that’s basically the legend of Giulia Tofana. But then, there’s this other part of the legend that doesn’t make any sense, this other legend really that has Giulia being captured, tortured, and executed in 1709, 50 years after what the original legend reported. And yet other versions claim that she was still imprisoned in 1730 which would make her 110 years old. The whole thing reeks of urban legend, honestly, the way it was adapted and retold by later generations who delayed the date of her execution to place her in their own time period. 


But Mike Dash really lays this story bare in his article “Aqua Tofana: slow-poisoning and husband-killing in 17th century Italy,” which I have linked in the description. He does a fantastic job trying to separate the fact from the fiction, very evidence based, he references a lot of contemporary writings and accounts of what actually happened. And he addresses a lot of discrepancies in the story, like why some accounts have Giulia Tofana dying in 1651 or 1659, others in 1709, and still others in 1730. So, let’s take a look at that now. Let’s try to find the truth in this. 


The thing about Mike’s article is that it barely mentions Giulia Tofana, honestly. She is practically a footnote. According to his assessment, Giulia played a much smaller role in the story of Aqua Tofana than the legend would have you believe, which is why I ultimately changed the title of this episode. Giulia played a much smaller role even than some of the other characters I already mentioned. Remember Giulia’s mother, Teofania di Adamo? Well she didn’t just get executed for murdering her own husband. There’s a lot more to that story. Mike references a discovery made by a man named Salomene-Marino. He apparently discovered a text with a title that translates to “Compendium of various successes in Palermo in the year 1632.” And this was written by a notary who lived in 1630s Palermo named Baldassare Zamparrone. Zamparrone describes an execution on July 12, 1633 and, yes, this is the execution of none other than Teofania di Adamo who the legends claim to be Giulia Tofana’s mother. And she was executed for poisoning. A second source written by a diarist named Gaetano Alessi with a title that translates to “Pleasant and curious news or anecdotes,” describes the poison used as “Acqua Tufania.” According to these sources, Teofania di Adamo didn’t just kill her husband with this poison, though, she was the one who actually created it and it was named after her and not Giulia Tofana. According to the sources, she sold the poison in Sicily with the help of an accomplice named Francesca La Sarda. And the two were quite successful businesswomen for a while before they were eventually caught, brought to trial, and executed in 1633. 


Salomene-Marino’s sources report that Teofania was executed by drawing and quartering which is honestly just an insane way to kill someone. Here’s Encyclopedia Britannica’s description of drawing and quartering quote “Drawing and quartering, part of the grisly penalty anciently ordained in England (in 1283) for the crime of treason. The full punishment for a traitor could include several steps. First he was drawn, that is, tied to a horse and dragged to the gallows. A so-called hurdle, or sled, is sometimes mentioned in this context. Although such a device may have been a means of mercy, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I (2nd ed., 1898; reissued 1996) states that it was more likely a way to deliver a live body to the hangman. The remainder of the punishment might include hanging (usually not to the death), usually live disemboweling, burning of the entrails, beheading, and quartering. This last step was sometimes accomplished by tying each of the four limbs to a different horse and spurring them in different directions,” end quote. I mean why? This is such overkill. They’re literally killing these people 5 different ways at once. Who came up with this? But, that’s kind of part of it, they’re being killed more than one way for more than one crime. For example, the Scottish patriot Sir William Wallace who you probably know better as Braveheart was drawn for treason, hanged for robbery and homicide, disemboweled for sacrilege, beheaded as an outlaw, and quartered for quote “divers depredations.” So Teofania may have been drawn and quartered. But another source, a botanist named Paolo Boccone who was born the year of Teofania’s execution recorded a different death entirely. He wrote that she was quote “closed and bound alive in a canvas sack… [and] thrown from the roofs of the Vicarate [which is the bishop’s palace] in to the street, in the presence of the populace,” end quote. So, I mean, these are both extreme and really give you an idea of how female poisoners were viewed in 17th century Italy. And, actually, this was happening in Sicily which was controlled by Spain at this time but whatever. 


So it sort of seems like Teofania di Adamo was the real mastermind behind Aqua Tofana. Salomene-Marino notes that it was the custom in Sicily at that time for the children of parents with unusual names to take those names as their surnames, their last name. So he’s trying to connect Giulia Tofana to Teofania di Adamo and this is why people believe that she was her daughter. Teofania is an unusual name and Giulia’s last name, Tofana, is eerily similar. Mike writes quote “Salomene-Marino was a noted authority on Sicilian tradition, and may be right about this. It is worth stressing, nonetheless, that this slight connection, which is by no means proven, is the only clear link that can be made between Di Adamo and Tofana, and between the poisonings that took place in the Palermo of the 1630s and those unleashed in Rome two decades later,” end quote. 


This next bit is based on old court records from the Archivio di Stato di Roma, which were contemporary, from the 1600s, and also a diary kept by a Roman gentleman named Giacinto Gigli (jee-lee). Gigli writes that Giulia arrived in Rome from Palermo, which if that is true, that, in my mind is another link to Teofania because she was operating in Palermo before her execution. So Giulia arrives in Rome with a much younger woman named Girolama Spara. And Mike doesn’t make this claim but an allthatsinteresting.com article about this says that Girolama Spara was Giulia’s daughter. I don’t know what if anything backs that up, just throwing it out there. So Giulia and Girolama Spara show up in Rome and they recruit several new accomplices - Giovanna de Grandis and Maria Spinola (who went by the nickname Gifola), these two were both poison makers. Then Laura Crispolti and Graziosa Farina who were saleswomen. So they’ve got this crew. And these are very specific names. This is elevating it, I think from urban legend to factual account and I’m assuming these names are coming from those court records. There was possibly someone else involved too, that priest I mentioned. His name was Father Girolamo of Sant’Agnese in Agone, which was a new church in Rome. His brother was an apothecary and he apparently supplied arsenic to this gang of 6 women who were peddling Aqua Tofana. 


So Giulia Tofana was the leader, for like a minute. Giovanna de Grandis confessed, after they got caught, that she had learned how to make the poison from Giulia. But Giulia apparently died in 1651. Mike says quote “probably in her own bed and apparently unsuspected of any crime,” end quote. And at that point, Girolama Spara, who may have been Giulia’s daughter, took over as the leader of the poison ring. They are really keeping this in the family. Girolama is like a third generation poison ring leader here, maybe. According to Alessandro Ademollo who published the results of his research into Italian archives in a short book with a title that translates to “The Mysteries of Aqua Tofana,” Girolama Spara was the widow of a gentleman from Florence and so she sold Aqua Tofana to the higher class ladies because she could move within the aristocratic circles while Giovanna de Grandis mostly dealt with the poorer clientele. Ademollo also tells us that, while these women were trying to make money, they sometimes supplied the poison for free to poor women in desperate situations because they were quote “angered by the abuse their wretched husbands meted out to them,” end quote. 


So before we get into how this all fell apart. Let’s have another look at Aqua Tofana based on these sources Mike mentions in his article. He says quote “Most accounts agree that Aqua Tofana was based on arsenic. But some state that it also contained toadflax, Spanish Fly, extract of snapdragon, a solution of pennywort known as aqua cymbelaria, and even madmen’s spittle,” end quote. Yes, madmen’s spittle. Which seems like it would be very hard to get and not actually all that effective. This stuff is like polyjuice potion. Mike goes on to say quote “The effects that Aqua Tofana supposedly had on its victims are summarized in a warning notice to the public that was issued in Rome late in the 1650s, when fear of the poison was at its height. According to this document, the chief symptoms were agonizing pains in the stomach and the throat, vomiting, extreme thirst and dysentery. All these are highly suggestive of arsenic poisoning, although Ademollo cites contemporary accounts suggesting that the poison made by Spara and her associates also contained antimony and lead. An entry in Gigli’s diary mentions a fourth possible ingredient, solimato – that is, corrosive sublimate, a highly toxic contemporary treatment for venereal disease more usually known today as mercuric chloride,” end quote. So this stuff was gnarly, but the thing is, we haven’t been able to recreate it today, not a poison with those subtle, slow acting effects like Aqua Tofana was supposed to have. This is like another lost technology, this should have been in the episode a few weeks ago. Mike writes quote “There is a third great puzzle, though – the hardest one of all to credit. For while every account of Aqua Tofana stresses its unmatched potency, both the strength and certainty of the poison, and its devilish elusiveness, are impossible to replicate today. The elixir was supposed to be one of the “slow-poisons,” much feared in the 17th century, which were so gradual in their operation as to make the victim appear … “as if dying from a decay of nature.” Yet the known potions of that period lacked the qualities ascribed to the Tofana poison; they were less reliable, more readily detected, and produced far more violent symptoms than Aqua Tofana was generally reputed to. All this leaves us with a problem. Might a group of poorly-educated poison-makers have somehow stumbled on a secret formula? Or is it safer to conclude that the tales told of Tofana are at best greatly exaggerated, and perhaps nothing but the product of contemporary hysteria and later tall tale telling?,” end quote. I think it was the madman spittle, that was what elevated it. No, I don’t know. 


Anyway, Giovanna de Grandis eventually gave a detailed account of one of these poisonings that they were responsible for when she was later interrogated by police. This was the death of a fairly well known guy named Francesco Cesi (chezy). He was a duke and his father was a prominent scientist who was friends with Galileo, and Francesco was also the nephew of the future Pope. So dude’s kind of a big deal. And he died. And everyone was like “oh well, I guess he got sick and died,” because that was happening, you know, like all the time. There were no antibiotics, life expectancy was low, people just died a lot, like all the time. So no one suspected that Francesco’s death was anything but natural. Until Giovanna de Grandis spilled the tea on his wife. Francesco was married to a woman, girl, I don’t know that I would call her a woman considering she was thirteen when they got married. She was also from a powerful family and her name was Maria Aldobrandini. So, when they got married he was like in his mid 40s and she was 13. Which, I just have no words. That’s insane that that was like socially acceptable. I just, no words. Maria was described in a contemporary survey of the women of Rome as quote “young and beautiful, courted by many, her beauty only slightly dimmed by smallpox scars,” which like, what is this survey of women thing? This is super icky to me, but whatever. So Maria is like young and beautiful and forcibly married to this gross old man and she falls in love with another guy, a count named Francesco Maria Santinelli. So she wants out of her marriage. Her husband’s health is already failing. She wants to speed things along so she can get with this other Francesco guy, the hot one, right? She gets in contact with the ladies poison ring through the shady priest, and he convinces Giovanna de Grandis to supply her with a bottle of Aqua Tofana. Within a day or two, her husband, the duke, was dead. Now it usually took longer than that so some have suggested that the entire bottle was accidentally tipped into his food instead of just a few drops, but who knows if that’s true. According to accounts, he died peacefully, like not vomiting profusely like you’d kind of expect if he ate an entire bottle of poison. So, it’s even possible that he died of natural causes before the poison actually kicked in. He was in bad health already. There was no suspicion of poison, there was no autopsy done even. They buried him and that was that. But even though his wife, Maria, got away with it, she did not get to reap her reward. Mike says quote “her own family locked her up in order to prevent her rushing into a scandalous and unequal second marriage with her lover Santinelli,” end quote. 


The whole operation was about to blow up though. But, none of Mike’s sources, none of these archives, court records, diaries, none of these contemporary reports mention a bowl of soup. Remember the legend version? That a woman put Aqua Tofana in her husband’s soup and then got cold feet and begged him not to eat it and gave the whole thing away. None of them mention that. What they mention instead is that a lot of women were showing up to church confessionals and confessing to their priests that they had poisoned their husbands. Archaeobotanist David Stuart writes in his book Dangerous Garden: The Quest for Plants to Change Our Lives, quote “it had come to the notice of Pope Alexander the seventh that great numbers of women, young and old, were confessing to their priests that they had poisoned their husbands with the new slow poisons. Even in the streets, it was popularly believed that young widows were unusually abundant,” end quote. Mike references a biography written at the time by a cardinal of Pope Alexander the seventh, a guy named Pietro Sforza-Pallavicini who was actually involved in the interrogation of Girolama Spara and the gang. So this is a pretty reliable account. He wrote that one of these women confessed to her priest that she had plotted to kill her husband. He wheeled and dealed with her, offered her immunity, and the whole story spilled out and that is how they were found out. 


But Roman chronicles and court records point to another version of their undoing. Apparently Giovanna de Grandis was sort of the weak link of the gang. She had come to the attention of the authorities, remember she was the one dealing with the poor women, not the aristocrats, so this was a shadier operation in general. She had come to the attention of the authorities who had detained her on 3 occasions. The 4th time she was arrested, she had a vial of the poison on her. But they actually let her go. Instead, they set up a sting operation, assuming that she wasn’t acting alone. They wanted to catch the whole gang. So they planted a woman, acting as an aristocrat who wanted to get out of an abusive relationship. She secured a bottle of Aqua Tofana, the police officers jumped out from behind a curtain, and the jig was up. The gang was rounded up and arrested. 


There is a trial which was recorded in bits and pieces in the Roman archives. Mike says quote “The main members of the gang were rapidly convicted, and – although the details of the sentences are missing from the record – we know that, on 6 July 1659, Spara herself, De Grandis, Maria Spinola, Laura Crispolti and Graziosa Farina were all hanged in the Campo di Fiori in the presence of an unusually large crowd,” end quote. Note, please note, Giulia Tofana, the main character of the urban legend version isn’t even part of this story anymore. She’s been dead for 8 years. I told you, it’s the secondary characters that really shine. Mike goes on quote “46 of the gang’s customers were subsequently “immured” for life. Most, if not all, of the women convicted in this way were surely De Grandis’s low-class clients,” end quote. And I had to look up what immured for life meant. According to Wikipedia, it’s quote “a form of imprisonment, usually until death, in which someone is placed within an enclosed space without exits,” end quote. 


Maria Aldobrandini was never charged even though Giovanna de Grandis offered a full confession of how she had murdered her husband, the duke. I mean, being rich really does get you off the hook in most cases. It’s ridiculous. The priest, Father Girolamo was also never charged or even mentioned in the court records. Mike says quote “It is uncertain whether he was dead by this point, or was spirited away by the church authorities; either way, he was never interrogated and did not stand trial,” end quote. Being a man also gets you off the hook apparently. 


So that kind of seems like the end of the story, right? Spara and her gang of poisoners were convicted and executed, minus the only man, of course. But the story weirdly doesn’t stop there because Giulia Tofana, who was like barely even in the story, crops back up in Naples in 1709 and then again in 1730. But Mike says these accounts are fewer in number, not quite contemporary, and they contradict each other. Plus they just don’t make sense. Other accounts have her dying multiple different ways in the 1650s. There’s no way she’s dying again somehow in 1730 at the age of 110. It just doesn’t add up. And Mike agrees. He thinks these were different women entirely who quote “may have been nicknamed after [their] infamous predecessor, or even appropriated Tofana’s name in order to benefit from the notoriety,” end quote. He goes on quote “All this, I think, allows for two conclusions. The first is that we can place the historical Giulia Tofana in the Rome of the 1640s and 1650s, and dismiss reports of murderous “Tophanas” in the Naples of the first third of the 18th century as errors that have muddied waters for two centuries. The second is that the notoriety of the Naples poisoners tells us a good deal about the lasting impression that the real Tofana made in early modern Europe. Her name, it’s clear, became synonymous with poison – not merely in Italy, but well outside its boundaries,” end quote, because some of the sources that have her in Naples in the 1700s were from Germany and France too, not just Italy. 


But, then again, Tofana, Guilia Tofana is one of only 3 poison ring leaders in this story and she’s actually the least documented. Mike writes quote “There seems to be no reason to doubt that Teofania di Adamo and Girolama Spara existed, and were executed for the crime of poisoning in 1633 and 1659 respectively. Giulia Tofana, on the other hand, remains a thoroughly shadowy figure,” end quote. Because Teofania and Girolama got in trouble, Giulia didn’t. So she’s who knows. We don’t have legit records about her, just anecdotal evidence in journals and whatnot. For the other two, considering their arrests, We have court records, we have Roman archives, we have the confessions of Girolama Spara and Giovanna de Grandis. Although Mike points out quote “at least some of the evidence against the gang was probably extracted using torture, which makes it dangerous to accept it at face value,” end quote. Indeed. False confessions under duress are a very real thing so please take that into account. 


So what can we make of all this? Well, I think what we can make of it is that this is more than an urban legend. There is more to this than myth. There do seem to have been women operating as Aqua Tofana dealers in 17th century Italy, possibly a family of women, grandmother, mother, daughter. And this business seems to have carried on after the 1659 execution of Girolama Spara and her gang, into the 1730s at least, probably other unrelated women mistaken for Giulia Tofana because they were using a similar poison, or using her name intentionally to ride on her coattails and boost their own businesses. But one of the clearest conclusions I can draw is that all of these women went to such lengths, took such risks, ended up executed, most of them, because there was a genuine need for the product they were selling. There was a healthy market for poison disguised as cosmetics, something women could obtain and keep, in plain sight even, without raising suspicion. Something they could easily use when the time was right, tipping a few drops into their abusers food, which they prepared daily anyway, and watching as it slowly took effect, mimicking natural disease and leading to a suspicionless death. And there was a market for this sort of thing because it addressed a serious pain point for these women. For most, it was the only way out of a bad situation, an abusive and potentially life threatening situation. For some it was likely kill or be killed. Yes there were women like Maria Aldobrandini who was just married to an old gross guy and wanted to marry her young lover. But even she, you guys, married at 13? To a 43 year old? That is abuse. That’s a different kind of abuse. And there were women who just wanted freedom. Who wanted to make their own decisions and have some kind of agency, control over their own lives. Because a wife in 17th century Rome, was property, not a person. They were completely at the mercy of their husbands and received little to no protection from the law. They were practically enslaved by their husbands. The word enslave is defined as quote “to cause someone to lose their freedom of choice or action.” Convince me they weren’t enslaved. 


Aqua Tofana came about because society in 16th century Italy was fundamentally flawed. The patriarchy was raging out of control, men were all powerful, and completely unchecked and Aqua Tofana was the only thing taking them down a notch, the only weapon women could wield in the invisible battle for their lives and liberty. And that, I think and Mike agrees, is why Aqua Tofana was given this sort of mythic, almost magical quality. Mike says quote “Certainly there is nothing in the surviving record to show that Di Adamo, Tofana herself, or Spara had any special expertise with poisons – and so little was understood in those days about the ways that potions worked that it is hard to believe that any of them could have stumbled across secrets that remain elusive even today. One plausible resolution of these problems is that the “Manna of St Nicholas” hawked by the gang was merely an ordinary arsenic poison, no more special or refined than any of the others sold in this period, and that the authorities’ willingness to believe in an Aqua Tofana possessed of almost supernatural powers was the product of fear – specifically, the fear that any ruling class feels when it finds itself suddenly vulnerable to the machinations of the poor,” end quote. And I would add to that “the fear that any class feels when it finds itself suddenly vulnerable to the machinations of women,” because that’s what’s really going on here. This wasn’t just the poor. Rich women were poisoning their husbands too. Women were wielding power over their husbands in the only way they could and that was terrifying for these men. They finally had a taste of what it was like to be at the mercy of someone else, someone who lives in your house, sleeps in your bed. And the reason Mike says “machinations of the poor” and not “machinations of women,” I think, and it’s not his fault, is because he’s a man and he has no perspective on the matter, he can’t. Because the thing is, as free and equal as we like to think of ourselves today, men and women, there is, first of all a long line of oppression and gender discrimination going back to ancient times still affecting the present, but also, there is a biological physical discrepancy. Men, for the most part, are physically stronger than women and more prone to resort to physical violence. They are, it’s biology, it’s muscles and hormones, testosterone. They have built in weapons for physical violence that women do not have. And women have always been and still are very much at their mercy because of that. Aqua Tofana terrified men because their weapons were no use against it. Because it meant that the meek, obedient, docile creature they kept under their control actually had a way to fight back. And they were not used to that. But when you force someone into a desperate situation, can you really be all that surprised when they resort to desperate measures? 


Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. If you yourself are in an abusive relationship, like the women in this story, please do not poison your partner. No but really, there is help available. In the United States you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233 or text begin to 88788. There is always a way out. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. Also, join the Patreon for exclusive bonus content plus all regular weekly episodes early and add free. I have a fun one coming out on Wednesday called Poisoned or Not Poisoned where I take a look at suspected historical poisonings like that of the famous composer Wolfang Amadaeus Mozart who was convinced before his death that he was being poisoned with something very like Aqua Tofana. That $5 a month, 16 cents a day, that’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.  


Information used in this episode was sourced from mikedashhistory.com, SyFy, National Centre for Domestic Violence, allthatsinteresting.com, TBS News, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Wikipedia. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.