Written by The Woman Who Armed Hundreds with Poison
Her name has echoed through history for nearly four centuries, whispered in the shadows of academia, sensationalized in true crime accounts, and recently reclaimed as a symbol of resistance. Giulia Tofana, the alleged creator of the deadly poison Aqua Tofana, is credited with enabling the deaths of over 600 men in 17th-century Italy. But was she a serial killer, a witch, an entrepreneur of death. Or something more complex?
The truth, as with most historical figures shrouded in legend, is far more nuanced than any single label can capture.
The Historical Record: Separating Fact from Legend
Here’s what makes Giulia Tofana’s story so challenging – much of what we “know” about her is likely fiction. Modern scholarship, particularly the work of historian Craig A. Monson in his 2020 book “The Black Widows of the Eternal City,” reveals that the romantic legend of Giulia Tofana is largely an invention of 19th-century historians who conflated multiple women into one sensational figure.
What We Can Verify
The most reliable research indicates that a woman named Giulia Mangiardi lived in Rome in the 1620s-1650s, and the surname “Tofana” may have been a later addition. According to Monson’s archival research, Giulia was from Corleone (not Palermo), married twice, and moved to Rome in 1624. She appears to have died peacefully in her sleep in 1651, with no contemporary records connecting her to poisoning activities.
The actual prosecution for the poison ring happened in 1659, eight years after this Giulia’s death. The woman at the center of that case was Girolama Spara, possibly Giulia’s stepdaughter, who along with several other women was arrested, tortured, and executed for manufacturing and selling poison.
The Legend That Grew
Over the following centuries, various accounts merged different women, different time periods, and sensationalized details into the figure we know as Giulia Tofana. Some versions place her in Palermo in the 1630s, others in Naples as late as 1730. The number 600, the alleged death toll, comes from confessions extracted under torture, a notoriously unreliable source of information.
Yet despite these historical uncertainties, the legend persists because it speaks to something real. The desperation of women trapped in a brutal patriarchal system, and the underground networks they created to survive.
The World She Lived In
To understand Giulia Tofana, whether as historical figure or cultural symbol, we must understand 17th-century Italy.
Women as Property
In the 1600s, Italian women existed in legal and social limbo. Young girls were the property of their fathers, who arranged marriages based on political alliances and financial gain with no consideration for the bride’s wishes. Once married, a woman became her husband’s property, with no legal rights to her own body, possessions, or children.
Divorce was the privilege of wealthy men alone. A woman couldn’t leave an abusive marriage, no matter how severe the violence. The Church preached submission and suffering as a wife’s sacred duty. If a husband beat, raped, or financially ruined his wife, she had no legal recourse.
Widowhood, paradoxically, was often the only path to any measure of female autonomy. Widows could own property, conduct business, and make decisions about their own lives. For women in truly desperate situations, their husband’s death might be the only escape.
The Poison Context
Poison wasn’t unusual in Renaissance Italy. The Borgia family had made it infamous a century earlier, and arsenic was a common ingredient in cosmetics of the era, used in face creams and beauty preparations. This made arsenical poisons particularly easy to disguise.
Women learned herbalism and medicine out of necessity. They were the primary healthcare providers for their families and communities. Midwives, wise women, and healers had extensive knowledge of plants and their properties, both healing and harmful. The line between medicine and poison was sometimes merely a matter of dosage.
Aqua Tofana: The Poison Itself
Whether or not Giulia Tofana personally created it, the poison that bears her name was terrifyingly effective.
The Formula
Aqua Tofana contained primarily arsenic and lead, possibly with belladonna added. The genius of its formulation was its subtlety. The poison was colorless and tasteless, easily mixed into wine or food.
The Method
Instructions accompanied each purchase. The first dose would cause weakness and exhaustion, the second brought stomach cramps and vomiting, and after a third or fourth dose, the victim would die. The symptoms mimicked common illnesses of the era, fevers, digestive ailments, wasting diseases. In an age before toxicology, these deaths appeared entirely natural.
This slow-acting quality served multiple purposes. It gave victims time to confess their sins and prepare for death (important in a Catholic society), it avoided the sudden suspicion that accompanies an abrupt death, and it allowed wives to play the devoted caretaker, nursing their dying husbands while slowly administering more poison.
The Packaging
The poison was disguised in bottles labeled “Manna di San Nicola” (Manna of St. Nicholas of Bari), marketed as a cosmetic or healing ointment. The vials often featured an image of St. Nicholas, making them appear as devotional objects. They could sit openly on a woman’s vanity alongside her other beauty preparations, arousing no suspicion whatsoever.
The Poison Ring: A Network of Women
What made Aqua Tofana so widespread wasn’t just the poison itself. It was the network of women who manufactured and distributed it.
The Circle
Historical records from the 1659 prosecution reveal a sophisticated operation. The women involved included midwives, herbalists, astrologers, and what were called “cunning women”, practitioners of folk magic and medicine.
Girolama Spara (possibly Giulia’s daughter or stepdaughter) worked as an astrologer and herbalist. Giovanna de Grandis was a midwife who moved from Palermo to Naples to Rome, part of this network. Maria Spinola sold charms and enchantments. Graziosa Farina, described as an elderly woman, distributed the poison during Mass and at public washing areas where women gathered.
These women weren’t random criminals, they were connected to the female community. As midwives, they attended births and knew family secrets. As herbalists, they had legitimate reasons to possess unusual substances. As fortune-tellers and charm-sellers, women already sought them out for help with marital problems.
The Operation
Operating from an apothecary shop in Rome, the ring maintained a public front selling legitimate remedies, poultices, powders, and potions for common ailments. Meanwhile, in back rooms, they manufactured the deadly poison.
According to some accounts, they may have received arsenic from a priest, Father Girolamo, whose brother was an apothecary. This detail, if true, suggests the complicity extended beyond the female network. That even religious figures understood the desperate circumstances driving women to such measures.
The Customers
The clientele ranged from duchesses to commoners. For wealthy clients, money was the primary motive, but the ring sometimes provided poison free to poor women in desperate situations, suggesting something beyond pure profit, a twisted form of social service.
The Fall
The legend varies on how the network was discovered, but the most commonly told version involves a moment of hesitation that unraveled everything.
The Bowl of Soup
A woman who had purchased the poison prepared her husband’s soup with a dose of Aqua Tofana, but as he raised the spoon to his mouth, she cried out, unable to go through with it. Her suspicious husband forced a confession, likely through violence. Under subsequent torture by authorities, the woman revealed her source.
Other accounts suggest a client confessed to a priest who violated the seal of confession, or that authorities captured a messenger carrying the poison. The exact trigger is lost to history, but the result was catastrophic.
Sanctuary and Execution
Giulia Tofana allegedly received warning of her arrest warrant and sought sanctuary in a church, where authorities initially couldn’t reach her. But then rumors spread, deliberately or accidentally, that she had poisoned Rome’s public water supply.
Whether true or a strategic ploy to force her out, this claim gave authorities justification to violate church sanctuary and arrest her. Under torture, she confessed to involvement in 600 deaths between 1633 and 1651 in Rome alone.
In 1659, five women from the poison ring were publicly hanged. Around forty of their customers, mostly lower-class women, were also executed. Upper-class clients faced imprisonment or banishment, though some escaped punishment entirely by claiming ignorance that their “cosmetics” were poisonous.
Witch or Something Else?
The question of whether Giulia Tofana was a witch depends on how we define the term.
In the Legal Sense
She wasn’t prosecuted for witchcraft in the supernatural sense. The charges were poisoning and murder. The Inquisition in Italy during this period was more concerned with heresy than with the folkloric witchcraft that obsessed Northern Europe.
However, several women in the ring were described as practitioners of folk magic, selling charms, telling fortunes, and performing rituals. This placed them in the liminal category of “cunning women” or “wise women” who existed on the edge of acceptable female power.
In the Cultural Sense
To her contemporaries, these women likely seemed witch-like. They possessed secret knowledge, brewed mysterious substances, and wielded power over life and death. They operated in shadows, spoke in code, and helped women transgress the most fundamental law – “thou shalt not kill.”
The apothecary shop where they worked, brewing poisons by moonlight while selling legitimate remedies by day, fits every Gothic image of a witch’s workshop.
In the Modern Reclamation
Today, many who identify as witches claim Giulia Tofana as a spiritual ancestor. Not because she literally practiced witchcraft, but because she represents female power operating outside patriarchal control. She used knowledge, of herbs, of chemistry, of women’s networks, to arm the powerless.
In this sense, she’s a witch in the way the term has been reclaimed: a woman who refused to submit, who possessed dangerous knowledge, and who was destroyed by authorities who feared female autonomy.
Evil or Liberator?
This is where the question becomes genuinely complex.
The Case for Evil
Let’s be unflinching: if the historical accounts are even partially accurate, Giulia Tofana enabled mass murder. Six hundred men died agonizing deaths, slowly poisoned over days while believing they were suffering from natural illness. Many were likely innocent of any abuse, killed by wives who wanted their money, wanted to remarry, or simply tired of marriage.
She profited from these deaths. This wasn’t charity; it was a business. The poison didn’t discriminate between genuine abusers and merely inconvenient husbands.
The method was particularly cruel, slow poisoning allowed no chance of defense, no opportunity for the victim to address grievances or seek help. It was premeditated, calculated, and cold.
From a moral standpoint, we must acknowledge that murder, even of abusers, circumvents justice and creates cycles of violence. Some of these deaths likely orphaned children, devastated families, and caused suffering beyond the immediate victim.
The Case for Understanding
Yet we must also understand the context. These women lived in a world of systemic, legal, sanctioned violence against them.
Wife-beating was not just tolerated but often encouraged as a husband’s right to “discipline” his spouse. Marital rape was impossible by definition. A wife’s body belonged to her husband. Women couldn’t own property, couldn’t leave, couldn’t seek legal remedy for abuse.
The Church and state actively maintained this system. A woman who fled an abusive husband could be forcibly returned. A woman who killed her husband in self-defense faced execution. There were no shelters, no divorce, no restraining orders.
For a woman in a truly dangerous marriage, facing death or severe injury from her husband, what options existed? Stay and potentially be killed? Flee and face poverty, shame, and likely being dragged back? Or remove the threat permanently?
Some scholars argue that Giulia Tofana and her network almost certainly saved lives as well as taking them. How many women would have been beaten to death by their husbands if they hadn’t struck first? How many died anyway, lacking access to the poison or the courage to use it?
The Complicating Factors
Not all clients used the poison to escape abuse. Some wanted wealth, freedom to marry lovers, or simply release from unhappy marriages. This muddies the moral waters considerably.
Yet even this reflects the impossible position of women. Forced into marriages they didn’t choose, denied any voice in their own lives, is it surprising some sought desperate exits?
The fact that the network sometimes provided poison free to poor women, while charging wealthy clients, suggests some awareness of social justice. Helping those with no other options while profiting from those who could pay.
The Legacy
Giulia Tofana’s story didn’t end with her execution.
The Affair of the Poisons
Her methods influenced the Affair of the Poisons in 17th-century France, a scandal involving poison-related murders at the court of King Louis XIV. The affair led to the execution of multiple fortune-tellers and poison-makers, and implicated powerful nobles.
The poison-maker at the center of the French scandal, La Voisin, operated similarly to Tofana’s network, providing poisons to women while also performing magical rituals and fortune-telling.
Mozart’s Death
On his deathbed in 1791, composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart claimed he’d been poisoned with Aqua Tofana, saying he was certain someone had given him the poison and calculated the time of his death. While scholars consider this claim unlikely, Mozart died over a century after Tofana’s execution, and his symptoms don’t match arsenic poisoning, the legend persists.
That Mozart would invoke Aqua Tofana shows how thoroughly the name had entered cultural consciousness as synonymous with mysterious, untraceable poison.
Modern Symbolism
Today, Giulia Tofana has been reclaimed as a feminist symbol, particularly in online spaces.
Following the 2024 U.S. presidential election and concerns about reproductive rights, some women coined the slogan “MATGA” (Make Aqua Tofana Great Again), referencing both Donald Trump’s slogan and Giulia Tofana’s poison. This movement involves social media posts showing women pretending to make the poison, not as serious intent, but as dark humor expressing rage at patriarchal control.
The invocation of Tofana in this context is telling. She represents the fantasy of female power that doesn’t ask permission, that doesn’t appeal to men for rights but simply takes them. She’s become a symbol of women’s anger and refusal to submit.
What Do We Make of Her?
Giulia Tofana cannot be reduced to a simple category. She was likely neither purely evil nor purely heroic, but something more human and complicated.
A Product of Her Time
She operated in a system that gave women almost no legitimate power and then condemned them for seeking it illegitimately. The patriarchal structure created the conditions for her business. Both the demand (desperate women) and the means (knowledge that was acceptable for women to possess).
An Entrepreneur of Death
She saw a need and filled it, profiting from the desperation of others. This is morally troubling regardless of the circumstances. Even if some clients were escaping abuse, others likely weren’t, and Tofana apparently didn’t discriminate.
A Symbol
Perhaps most importantly, Giulia Tofana has become larger than whatever historical person she may have been. She represents female rage, female power, female refusal to accept victimhood even if the methods are morally indefensible.
Her story asks uncomfortable questions: What do we do with oppression so complete that the only escape is through violence? How do we judge survival strategies used by people with no good options? Where is the line between victim and perpetrator when someone who has been victimized harms others?
The Uncomfortable Truth
We live in a different world now. Women have legal rights, can divorce, can report abuse, can own property. But domestic violence still kills, marital rape still happens, and systems still fail to protect vulnerable women.
When modern women invoke Giulia Tofana, they’re not actually advocating for poisoning men. They’re expressing something darker and more honest: the rage of being controlled, the fantasy of having power that doesn’t depend on male approval, the ancestral memory of generations of women who had no good choices.
Giulia Tofana reminds us that “good” and “evil” are sometimes luxuries available only to those with options. For women with no legal recourse, no economic power, and no physical strength to overcome their oppressors, morality looked different.
Does that excuse murder? No. But it contextualizes it in ways that simple condemnation cannot.
Thoughts
Was Giulia Tofana a witch? In the sense that she possessed dangerous knowledge and operated outside acceptable female roles – yes. In the supernatural sense – probably not.
Was she evil? She enabled hundreds of deaths, some certainly of abusive men, others perhaps not. That’s evil by most moral frameworks.
Was she a liberator? She gave some women their only path to freedom, even if that path led through death.
The truth is, she was all of these things and none of them. She was a woman navigating an impossible situation in a brutal era, making choices we can never fully judge because we’ve never faced her circumstances.
Her legacy endures not because history has resolved the moral questions her life raises, but because those questions remain painfully relevant. How do the powerless gain power? What do we do when the system offers no justice? Where is the line between survival and violence?
Giulia Tofana doesn’t provide answers to these questions. She simply embodies them, poison bottle in hand, waiting in the shadows of history for us to decide what we think of her.
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Reflection Questions
– How do you judge historical figures whose actions were shaped by oppressive systems we can barely imagine?
– Is there a meaningful difference between killing in self-defense and killing an abuser while they sleep?
– What does it mean that women today invoke Giulia Tofana as a symbol? What need does that symbolism meet?
– Can someone be both victim and perpetrator? How do we hold both truths?
– What would genuine justice have looked like for both the abused wives and the poisoned husbands in 17th-century Italy?
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The story of Giulia Tofana haunts us because it refuses easy answers. Perhaps that discomfort is precisely what makes her story worth telling.