Detail from “The love potion” by Evelyn De Morgan (1903). The tangled tale of Aqua Tofana is intimately connected to the “criminal magical underworlds” that flourished in the 17th century. Swarming with dubious alchemists, self-proclaimed sorcerers and renegade priests, these remarkable communities supplied love philtres, charms and poisons of varying efficacy to a mostly female clientele.
Early in the autumn of 1791, while he was still hard at work on the great requiem mass that would form such a large part of his legend, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart fell mortally ill. Convinced that there was no chance of recovery, he
began to speak of death, and asserted that he was setting the Requiem for himself… “I feel definitely,” he continued, “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 acqua tofana and calculated the precise time of my death.
Scholars have wrangled now for two full centuries over the circumstances of the great composer’s passing. A handful have concluded that he really was murdered. Most support rival diagnoses of syphilis, rheumatic fever or even the deadly effects of eating undercooked pork chops. Whatever the truth, though, and however he died, Mozart was certainly convinced that there existed a rare poison, one that was colourless, tasteless, odourless, beyond detection – and also so flexibly murderous that a precisely-calculated dose could guarantee a victim’s death a week, a month or even a year after it had been administered.
Nor was the composer alone in this belief. Forgotten though it is today, the mysterious liquid that he feared so much was one of the great whispered secrets of Europe. Aqua Tofana was credited with what amounted to supernatural powers, and blamed for hundreds of agonising deaths. Which is odd, since it is very far from clear that it ever existed – and, if it did, what it was, where it was invented, where first used, and when and how it got its name.
How to destroy a man
Mozart on his death bed, surrounded by the materials for his unfinished requiem – a piece commissioned by an unknown patron via a mysterious “grey gentleman.” Romantic accounts of the composer’s death suggest that he came to believe that he was composing the requiem for himself.
The story as it is commonly told is this: Aqua Tofana was the creation of a Sicilian woman named Giulia Tofana, who lived and worked in Palermo in the first half of the 17th century. It was a limpid, harmless-looking liquid, a scant four to six drops of which were “sufficient to destroy a man.” Its principal ingredient was arsenic, and, while its use spread throughout much of southern Italy, it was typically administered by women to their husbands, most commonly in order to come into their fortunes – poisons were often known as “inheritance powders” in those days.
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. For this reason, generous allowance needs to be made for contemporary misogyny when we think about this tale; one of the few constants in the various portraits of events is the depiction of Tofana and her gang as hags, and their female customers as faithless Jezebels.
Chambers’s Journal, for example, stresses the horror of a strong man reduced to nothing by his wife, and tells us that the poison was a subtle killer:
Administered in wine or tea or some other liquid by the flattering traitress, [it] produced but a scarcely noticeable effect; the husband became a little out of sorts, felt weak and languid, so little indisposed that he would scarcely call in a medical man…. After the second dose of poison, this weakness and languor became more pronounced… The beautiful Medea who expressed so much anxiety for her husband’s indisposition would scarcely be an object of suspicion, and perhaps would prepare her husband’s food, as prescribed by the doctor, with her own fair hands. In this way the third drop would be administered, and would prostrate even the most vigorous man. The doctor would be completely puzzled to see that the apparently simple ailment did not surrender to his drugs, and while he would be still in the dark as to its nature, other doses would be given, until at length death would claim the victim for its own…
To save her fair fame, the wife would demand a post-mortem examination. Result, nothing — except that the woman was able to pose as a slandered innocent, and then it would be remembered that her husband died without either pain, inflammation, fever, or spasms. If, after this, the woman within a year or two formed a now connection, nobody could blame her; for, everything considered, it would be a sore trial for her to continue to bear the name of a man whose relatives had accused her of poisoning him.
The indetectibility of Aqua Tofana, then, was the poison’s greatest asset. “The acutest analysts,” Chambers’s continues, “were utterly unable to testify to its presence in the organs of one of its victims after the most searching post-mortem examination. It was, in fact, the poisoner’s beau-idéal of a poison.” And its slow action had two key benefits: it made the symptoms it produced in its victims resemble those of advancing disease, and – no small matter in deeply religious Italy – it not only gave a dying husband time to put his affairs in order, but also ensured that he was able to repent his sins. Since that in turn was thought to guarantee his entry into heaven, his killer did not even need to feel much guilt over the fate of his eternal soul.
Arsenic is mined, then oxidised to produce a soluble powder that is tasteless, colourless and odourless. Image: Wikicommons.
In the course of a career that lasted for more than 50 years (the same accounts generally continue), Tofana and her gang were able to use this poison to dispose of at least 600 victims. Their secret was well-kept for all those years by a widening group of satisfied clients. Indeed, according to the Abbé Gagliani, a worldly-wise gambler and wit who wrote a century or so later, “there was not a lady in Naples who had not some of it lying openly on her toilette among her perfumes. She alone knows the phial, and can distinguish it.”
There are several problems, nonetheless, with these versions of events. One is that there are two wildly different versions of Tofana’s story. The first has her flourishing in Sicily as early as the 1630s; the second has her still alive in prison a century later. She is supposed to have operated in Palermo, in Naples, and in Rome, and is variously said to have been the inventor of the poison that bears her name, or merely its inheritor. Nor is there any certainty when it comes to the ingredients of her elixir. 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.
A detail from “An alchemist’s laboratory,” one of several mid-nineteenth century studies by the Scottish engineer James Nasmyth. Such labs were “state-of-the-art” in Giulia Tofana’s time, and far more sophisticated than anything she and her gang would have had access to.
The mysteries multiply when we consider the vexed question of when, and how, Tofana met her end. One source says that that she died of natural causes in 1651, another that she found sanctuary in a convent, and lived on there for many years, continuing to make her poison and dispensing it via a network of nuns and clerics. Several sources assert that she was captured, tortured and executed, though they differ as to whether her death occurred in 1659, or 1709, or 1730. In one especially detailed account, Tofana was dragged bodily from her sanctuary and strangled, after which “her body was thrown at night into the area of the convent from which she had been taken.”
There is a third great puzzle, though – the hardest one of all to credit. For while every account of the 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 – in the words of Charles Mackay – “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?
The two Tofanas
Salvatore Salomene-Marino, a Sicilian doctor whose work in the Palermo archives gives us clues as to how the legend of Aqua Tofana first arose.
Tracing the varying accounts of both the poison and its makers back to the earliest sources goes a long way to unpicking aspects of the mystery without fully resolving anything – for it transpires that there are two quite separate versions of the story, and hence two possible Tofanas. The first (and surely the most reliable) of these accounts is based on Italian archives and was supplied by two 19th century scholars: Alessandro Ademollo (1826-1891), who published the results of his researches in a short booklet entitled I Misteri dell’Acqua Tofana, and Salvatore Salomene-Marino (1847-1916), whose article ‘L’Acqua Tofana’ appeared in the journal Nuove Effemeridi Siciliane. Both these works appeared in 1881, but Ademollo published first, and it is possible that Salomene-Marino’s investigation was prompted by a reading of I Misteri, which he cites in his own paper.
Together, their researches place Tofana firmly in early 17th century Sicily, and explain that she was only one of a group of poisoners and wise women who collectively sold death throughout half of Italy for the best part of 30 years. The second, rival, version of events can be sketched by drawing together material that first appeared in French and German in the first half of the 18th century. These accounts describe a Tofana who was active in the first years of the 18th century, and lived on in a Naples prison as late as 1730.
Perhaps the best place to begin this attempt to recover an historical Giulia Tofana from several hundred years’ worth of rumour, shoddy writing and invention is with Salomene-Marino, a Sicilian antiquarian who discovered – in the Compendio di diversi successi in Palermo dall’anno 1632, written by a contemporary Palermo notary named Baldassare Zamparrone (1581-1648) – the earliest account that seems to have a bearing on this case. This is a description of the execution on 12 July 1633 of a poisoner by the name of Teofania di Adamo. A second source, the diarist Gaetano Alessi‘s Notizie piacevoli e curiose ossia aneddoti…, describes the poison used as “Acqua Tufània.” Salomene-Marino concludes that it was Di Adamo who first created the poison known of Aqua Tofana and that it was named after her. His sources say that she sold it in the Sicilian capital with the assistance of an accomplice, Francesca La Sarda.
Ferdinando Afán de Ribera, Duke of Alcalá and viceroy of Sicily, ruled over Palermo at the time of the earliest suspected case of poisoning by Aqua Tofana.
According to those same records, Di Adamo’s poison killed its victims in three days, and it seems that she and La Sarda operated successfully for some time before being captured and brought to trial. Sicily was at that time a part of the Spanish empire, and it was the Spanish viceroy, Ferdinando Afán de Ribera, who seems to have taken most of the credit for bringing the pair to justice. His personal involvement in the case, and the peculiarly horrible manner of Di Adamo’s death – by a form of drawing and quartering that was apparently excruciating even by the normal standards of this punishment – both suggest that the women’s crimes were considered especially revolting.
The next trace of what might or might not have been Aqua Tofana is provided by Ademollo, who places it in Naples in the years 1643-45. It is worth pointing out that this city was also a Spanish possession at the time; indeed it was the capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Naples was, thus, precisely the sort of place likely to attract refugees from Palermo who were on the run from the Sicilian authorities. Whether that has any bearing on the case or not, the unpublished despatches of Vincenzo de’Medici, the Florentine agent in Naples, record the arrest of a third woman for the crime of poisoning and give some details of the poison’s effects. According to Ademollo, the Naples toxicant worked in exactly the same way as Di Adamo’s poison, and was thus probably also Aqua Tofana. This seems something of a stretch – if the active ingredient in Aqua Tofana was arsenic, then many arsenic-based poisons would have produced similar symptoms – and Medici’s notes, still stored in a Florence archive, do nothing to resolve this problem. Nor do we know the name, the methods, clientele or even fate of the Naples poisoner.
The Campo Vaccino in Rome in 1653, on the site of the old imperial forum, shortly after Giulia Tofana would have known it.
Aqua Tofana, though, has always been most closely associated with Rome, and it is there that we first encounter Giulia Tofana a few years after the Naples poisoning. Salomene-Marino says that she came to the city from Palermo, and does what he can to link her to Teofania di Adamo – it was then the custom, he notes, for the children of parents with unusual Christian names to take them as their surnames, and on that basis he suggests that Tofana was Teofania’s daughter. 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.
Salomene-Marino and Ademollo – the latter basing his work on research in old court records from the Archivio di Stato di Roma, a contemporary chronicle, and the famous diary kept by a Roman gentleman named Giacinto Gigli – write that Tofana arrived in what was then the wealthy capital of the Papal States in the company of a much younger woman, Girolama Spara. The pair had apparently fled Palermo in the wake of an attempted poisoning gone wrong, and quickly resumed their old activities. They recruited several new accomplices – two poison-makers, Giovanna de Grandis and Maria Spinola (nicknamed Grifola), and two saleswomen, or “dispensers,” named Laura Crispolti and Graziosa Farina. At some point, this group obtained a regular supply of arsenic by striking up an acquaintance with a dubious priest, Father Girolamo of Sant’Agnese in Agone, a new church in the centre of Rome. Girolamo’s brother, it appears, was an apothecary and none to scrupulous as to who he sold poisons to.
A 17th century glass flask designed to contain Manna of St Nicholas – a healing oil supposed to drip miraculously from the bones of the saint better known to us now as Father Christmas. According to contemporaries, Aqua Tofana was sold, disguised as Manna, in bottles like this.
It was this gang of six who made and sold Aqua Tofana in Rome during the 1650s. So little is known about the women that it is impossible to do more than speculate about their relationships and what brought them together. No clear pattern can be discerned, but Tofana was apparently the leader – De Grandis would eventually confess that she was taught to make poison by her – and the group contained both Sicilians and native Romans. Maria Spinola was from Sicily, though she had been in Rome since 1627, but De Grandis and the two “dispensers,” Crispolti and Farina, were born in the Eternal City, and presumably used their local contacts to bring in business for the group.
Tofana died in about 1651 – probably in her own bed, and apparently unsuspected of any crime – and from then on Spara took over as leader of the gang. She was, Ademollo says, the widow of a Florentine gentleman by the name of Carrozzi, and moved comfortably in aristocratic circles, while De Grandis dealt mostly with less exalted clients. According to one contemporary manuscript, unearthed in a local archive, Spara operated as a kind of “cunning woman” who sold charms and cures to the gentlewomen and nobility of Rome. These activities would not only have introduced her to potential customers, but would also have given her a shrewd idea of which of her clients were happy in their marriages and which unhappy – not to mention which might be desperate enough to seek drastic remedies, and be able to keep a secret.
We have only a handful of clues as to how the members of the gang went about their business. Spara and her confederates, both Italian historians say, took the arsenic supplied by Father Girolamo and disguised it, first by turning it into a liquid and then by bottling it in glass jars that identified it as “Manna of St Nicholas” – a miraculous healing oil that supposedly sweated from the saint’s bones in far-off Bari. Liquids purporting to have been collected at the saint’s tomb were commonly available at this time, often in elaborately decorated bottles, and the manna’s celebrated sanctity, and its reputation as a cure-all, rendered it unlikely that any “holy bottle” would attract suspicion or be subjected to minute inspection. We also know (at least, Ademollo tells us) that while Spara’s chief motive was money, she sometimes did supply her poison free to poor women in desperate situations, out of pity or because she was angered by the abuse their wretched husbands meted out to them.
Maria Aldobrandini, Duchess of Ceri – seen here in middle age – was the most distinguished of the Roman noblewomen caught up in the Aqua Tofana affair. She was widely believed to have used the poison to murder her husband in 1657 – but the scandal was hushed up. She never stood trial, and lived on until 1703.
The effects that Aqua Tofana supposedly had on its victims are summarised 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 agonising 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.
Ademollo lists several suspected victims of Aqua Tofana, but there is room here to examine only a single case in detail. This is the death of Francesco Cesi, who was the Duke of Ceri and certainly the richest and most powerful of all those caught up in the poisoning scandal. The scion of a highly distinguished family (his father had been a noted scientist and an intimate of Galileo, and he himself was nephew to the future Pope Innocent XI), Cesi died suddenly and unexpectedly in June 1657. Suspicion eventually fell on his even better-connected young wife, Maria Aldobrandini, a member of one of Rome’s most powerful and influential noble clans.
The facts, insofar as they can now be ascertained, are certainly suggestive. The Duke was, firstly, at least 30 years older than his wife; he seems to have been born around 1608 and first married in 1626. Aldobrandini, who was his second wife, was only 13 years old when they wed in 1648, and thus still no more than 22 when the Duke died (“young and beautiful, courted by many,” her beauty only slightly dimmed by smallpox scars, according to a contemporary survey of the ladies of Rome). This lends at least some plausibility to Ademollo’s account, even though his information was drawn from information given by Giovanna de Grandis while she was facing by the likelihood of execution, with all that that implies for its reliability.
The ambiguous figure of Francesco Sentinelli – rake, alchemist and Rosicrucian – lies at the heart of the Aqua Tofana mystery.
According to De Grandis’s testimony, the Duchess had fallen hopelessly in love with another suitor: a handsome count (and incorrigible rake) by the name of Francesco Maria Santinelli (1627-97). Santinelli showered her with love poetry, which Ademollo points out can be used to date the start of their relationship to the months before the Duke of Ceri died. Aldobrandini’s infatuation gave her a pressing reason to rid herself of a husband who was – Ademollo says – in any case already ailing.
The Duchess’s first contact with Spara’s gang came via the shady priest Father Girolamo. De Grandis’s testimony states that the priest came to see her in search of a poison that could be trusted to do its work inconspicuously; Aldobrandini was fearful of administering anything that might make her husband vomit so copiously that he suspected her. De Grandis, who had a healthy respect for the power of the Roman nobility, was not keen to become entangled with her, but the Father Girolamo calmed her fears. He pointed out that Aqua Tofana was a gentle poison that did not cause much vomiting, and added that, in any case, the Duke’s food passed through so many hands that there was little danger of any suspicion falling on them.
De Grandis agreed to supply a bottle of her poison, which seems to have been disguised, as usual, as “Manna of St Nicholas.” The priest, in turn, passed it on to a trusted female servant of the Duchess, and within a day or two the Duke was dead (one version of the story, of unknown reliability, suggests that the whole bottle was tipped into his food in error). There seem to have been no immediate suspicions that poison was involved, and there was no autopsy, even though the cause of death was scarcely clear. But the body was placed in an open casket in the basilica of Santa Maria supra Minerva, and when De Grandis went to see it there, she realised immediately that the Duke had met his death by poison.
The interior of the basilica of Santa Maria supra Minerva – one of Rome’s most beautiful churches, and the resting place of the Duke of Ceri. Image: Wikicommons.
If Maria Aldobrandini was guilty of her husband’s murder, her actions did her little good; Federico Gualdi notes that her own family locked her up in order to prevent her rushing into a scandalous and unequal second marriage with her lover Santinelli. But she at least escaped suspicion of having anything to do with the Duke’s swift death – until, that is, Spara’s gang was rounded up the following year.
How the group’s murderous activities came to light is far from clear. Several popular accounts suggest that Spara and her associates became dangerously overconfident and greedy, allowing their clients to commit so many murders in so short a time that the spate of deaths was obvious to everybody. According to David Stuart, for example,
it had come to the notice of Pope Alexander VII 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.
Alexander VII, the Pope who presided over the unravelling of La Spara’s poisoning ring.
An alternative sequence of events can be found in book five of the Vita di Alessandro VII, a lengthy contemporary biography, published posthumously, by Pietro Sforza-Pallavicini. Pallavicini, who was one of the Alexander’s cardinals, writes that the first hint of scandal emerged from the confessional; one of Spara’s clients admitted to her priest that she had plotted to kill her husband. A hurried consultation resulted in an offer of immunity, and the entire story soon spilled out. This account deserves careful consideration. Not only was Pallavicini a senior member of the city’s government; Ademollo adds that he was also personally involved in the interrogations of the members of Spara’s group, and as such was in the perfect position to set down a reliable summary of the gang’s downfall.
There is, nonetheless, yet a third version of the unveiling of the poisoners. Roman chronicles and court records suggest that the gang was exposed not by the activities of Spara’s aristocratic contacts, but by the low class clients whom she left to Giovanna de Grandis. De Grandis, in this telling, was the weak link in Spara’s operation; she had come to the attention of the authorities and been detained on no fewer than three occasions. Her luck ran out with a fourth arrest; this time she was caught with a sample of her poison on her, and although she claimed that it was simply a potion intended to remove unwanted marks from clients’ faces, her captors suspected otherwise.
Cardinal Pietro Sforza-Pallavicini (1607-67) set out an account of the poisoners’ capture in his Life of Alexander VII.
In this version of events, the Roman authorities chose to act with a discretion and a willingness to play a long game seldom exhibited by police during the seventeenth century. Realising that De Grandis could not be working alone, they released her, allowed her to go back to her old haunts, and then set up an elaborate trap to catch both her and her confederates. A Florentine noblewoman by the name of signora Loreti was brought to the city and set up with the identity of the “Marchesa Romanini.” Establishing her bona fides by moving into a substantial mansion in a fashionable district of the city, Loreti began to pay visits to De Grandis. At first the fake Marchesa sought the services of an astrologer, but it was not long before she was spinning tales of an unhappy marriage and offering huge sums for a bottle of Aqua Tofana. An appointment was agreed, and, as soon as the exchange was made, two officers and a notary stepped out from behind a curtain. The liquid in the bottle handed to Loreti was tested on a number of stray animals. It swiftly killed them, and the whole of Spara’s gang was rounded up and brought to trial.
The result was the scandalous court case whose written remnants Ademollo discovered during his searches of Rome’s archives. 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. Ademollo mentions that five accomplices were also tried, but we have no record of their fates, and the Vita di Alessandro VII adds that 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; Gigli’s diary notes that they were packed off to prison rather than banished or detained in convents, the fates most often meted out to well-bred female criminals in this period.
Rome’s Campo di Fiori in 1700, a little more than 40 years after it witnessed the public executions of five women charged with dispensing Aqua Tofana to the wives of Rome. Click to enlarge.
There are certainly hints that attempts were made to limit the scope of the scandal. Some very prominent and powerful people had found themselves caught up in the investigation, and Ademollo states that Alexander VII himself ordered that Maria Aldobrandini’s name should be kept out of Spara’s trial; the Duchess was apparently never charged with any wrongdoing, and lived on until 1703. The dubious Father Girolamo is another conspicuous absentee from the records of the case. 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. Nor was any attempt made – publicly at least – to trace the full extent of the priest’s connections in either the Roman underworld or in high society. This creates a considerable gap in our understanding of the case for – as will become apparent later – renegade clerics of Girolamo’s type were essential to the functioning of the “magical underworlds” that seem to have existed in most large cities throughout Europe at this time.
What conclusions may be drawn thus far regarding the Tofana poison? 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, though the existence of the process found by Ademollo, together with a printed warning to the citizens of Rome, containing a detailed description of the symptoms produced by poison sold in the Eternal City during the 1650s, is decent evidence that arsenic was being used in that time and that place. Nonetheless, while Francesca Flores gave information on Spara’s activities to the authorities, and Spara herself supposedly offered a free confession on the steps of the gallows, at least some of the evidence against the gang was probably extracted using torture, with all that that implies for its reliability.
A 19th century artist’s impression of Girolama Spara, Giovanna de Grandis and other members of their poisoning gang, from Luigi Capranica’s “penny dreadful” Donna Olimpia Pamfilli (1870).
There certainly is evidence of wrongdoing, separate from the gang’s confessions. In this respect, signora Loreti’s testimony is particularly damning, but Spara’s sister also let the authorities search the gang’s headquarters and gather evidence, and Ademollo mentions the testimony of one Francesco Landini, a captain in the Papal forces who moved into Spara’s house after her execution and there discovered a buried flask containing a clear liquid; tested on a stray dog, it proved to be a lethal poison. At root, however, whether or not one believes in the existence of a special poison, Aqua Tofana, depends on the assessment of two ambiguous bits of evidence.
There is, first, Ademollo’s statement that the Duke of Ceri died peacefully – a rarity in cases of arsenic poisoning. This might imply that Spara’s potions really were unusually subtle; equally, it could mean that the already ailing Duke died of natural causes. Second, the evidence produced at the trial of 1659 suggests that the gang had built up a considerable clientele. That might suggest that they were known to make and sell effective toxicants. The reality, however, is that their success might just as easily have been the product of coincidence and wishful thinking. 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.
Wilrich von Daun, the Austrian Viceroy of Naples from 1707-09 and 1713-19.
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. And certainly the idea that the effects of Aqua Tofana were consistently exaggerated helps to account for the existence of that strange late batch of sources detailing the activities of a second Tofana in early 18th century Naples. These reports are fewer in number than the manuscripts sources consulted by Ademollo and Salomene-Marino; they are not quite contemporary, and they contradict one another. But the authorities they cite are far from negligible, and they have to be examined if we are to fully understand the history of slow-poisoning in Italy.
There are three authorities for the existence of this second killer. The first is the French Dominican missionary and traveller Jean-Baptiste Labat, who describes the capture and execution of an old woman who sold poison-filled bottles of Manna of St Nicholas in Naples in 1709. The second is Pius Nikolaus von Garelli, who was personal physician to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI at the time that his master became King of the Two Sicilies. Garelli states, in a letter written to a friend, the German doctor Friedrich Hoffman, that a poisoner had used Aqua Tofana to kill more than 600 men, women and children in the same city. Finally, Johann Georg Keysler – who was in Naples in 1730 – notes than an old woman whom he calls “Tophana” was held in prison there as late as 1730.
Cardinal Francesco Pignatelli, who – according to Labat’s account– protected the Naples poisoner.
It is easiest to deal, first, with Labat’s account. It fills four pages of a travelogue published a quarter of a century later, and describes the activities of a murderer who practised her trade in Naples under the protection of the church. Labat says that she frequently changed her residence to evade detection, and was quick to retire to a monastery or convent whenever she felt under threat – an arrangement that permitted her to be “extremely defiant.” His account was widely disseminated in the 18th and 19th centuries, and a large number of secondary sources, for example the Encyclopedia Londinensis, explicitly identify this poisoner as “Tofana.”
According to Labat, it took the Viceroy of Naples himself – an Austrian by the name of Wilrich von Daun – to secure the old woman’s arrest. Ignoring the protests of the church, Von Daun ordered that she be dragged bodily from the convent where she had sought sanctuary, and brought to the Castell dell’Ovo, a stronghold in the Bay of Naples where she could safely be interrogated. The arrest caused a sensation, chiefly because it was an explicit challenge to the power of the church; Labat notes that the Cardinal-Archbishop of Naples, Francesco Pignatelli, was so angered at Von Daun’s defilement of sanctuary that he threatened to excommunicate the whole city if the prisoner was not immediately returned to him. The wily Viceroy countered by putting about the story that his captive had just confessed to a plot to poison every spring in the city, together with the granaries and the fruits in the markets. Word of this supposed conspiracy against the lives of ordinary Neapolitans was sufficient to switch the support of the Naples mob from the Cardinal to the civil authorities; Von Daun had his captive executed and – as was noted earlier – then dealt with Pignatelli’s protest, returning his prisoner’s body to the church by the contemptuous method of having the corpse hurled over the wall of the convent in which she had sheltered.
Castell dell’Ovo [“Egg Castle”], just offshore in the Bay of Naples, was where Von Daun had the Naples poisoner of 1709 interrogated. Detail from a sketch by an anonymous artist, c.1620.
It is possible to square some elements of Labat’s version of events with the account given by Garelli, the physician, who also describes a poisoner at work in Naples. Garelli’s chief interest lay in the composition of Aqua Tofana – which he describes as “nothing else than crystallised arsenic dissolved in water, but with the addition, for what purpose I know not, of the herb Cymbalaria (snapdragon)” – but he was apparently quite well-informed, having his information direct from the Emperor, who had read the process (prosecution file) on the case. He adds that the poisoner was captured, and confessed, and was still alive in prison when he wrote. This statement, in turn, can be linked to the evidence of J.G. Keysler [the name also appears sometimes as “Kessler” or “Kessler”], who in his “Letter 57,” written from Naples in March or April 1730, reports:
Tophana, the noted female poisoner, from whom Aqua Tophana took its name, is still in Prison here, and most strangers, out of Curiosity, go to see her: She is an old little Woman, who had belonged to some religious sisterhood, for which Reason her Life had been spared; tho’ she sent many hundred People out of the World, and, in particular, was very liberal of her Drops, by way of Alms, to married Women, who would, it may well be supposed, have no great Regret at getting rid of disagreeable Husbands. From four to six Drops of this liquid is a quantity sufficient to do a Man’s Business, and some affirm, that the Dose may be ordered so as to take Effect in a determinate Time.
Jean-Baptiste Labat, a French monk and noted traveller, picked up a story about poisonings in Naples while living in Italy in 1709.
Three accounts, then, all concerning poison in Naples, all dating to between 1700 and 1730 – and all, it is possible to imagine from internal evidence, concerned with a single female murderer who was active in the city in those years. Superficially, at least, the chief difficulty is that while it might be plausible to pair the accounts – supposing, for instance, that Garelli’s undated letter, referring to “that infamous poisoner, still alive in Naples,” was drafted before the execution of Von Daun’s prisoner, or that Keysler’s “old little Woman” who was “still” in gaol in 1730 was the same captive mentioned by Garelli – it requires considerable rewriting to link all three. Keysler’s mention of a “Tophana” who had “belonged to some religious sisterhood” might be a garbled reference to the poisoner described by Labat who frequently sought sanctuary in convents. But although the French monk was at Civitavecchia, almost 200 miles from Naples, when the incidents that he describes took place (and hence may well have had his details unreliably and at second hand), there is little justification, other than convenience, for accepting his account of a killer who concealed herself in convents, while dismissing outright the story of her arrest and execution.
A second and far more important concern emerges only from re-examination of the original accounts of the three witnesses. These were written in French, Latin and German, and were plainly seldom consulted by the secondary authorities who compiled English-language accounts of Aqua Tofana in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Instead, these later writers either made assumptions or copied from each other, with the result that the secondary literature is clogged with near-identical accounts attributing the Naples killings to a poisoner named “Tofana” or “Tophana”. To give a single representative example, the New-York Mirror of 13 April 1833 states that
Labat says that she was arrested in 1709… and Garelli… whose authority on this point is most to be relied on, writes to a friend, about 1719, that she was still in prison in Naples.
Research for this essay establishes that Keysler’s “Travels” are the only source naming an early 18th century “Tophana”.
None of this is true. Read in the original, it is immediately clear that only Keysler actually claims knowledge of an 18th century “Tophana.” Labat’s account fails to name the woman dragged from a convent in 1709, suggesting only that the poison that she used must have been Aqua Tofana; Garelli, similarly, refers first to “a certain slow poison, which that infamous poisoner, still alive in Naples, employed to the destruction of six hundred persons,” and only later to a liquid “known in the vulgar Neapolitan tongue as Aqua Tofana.” It is impossible to be certain, at this remove, of the identity of the killer whom Garelli considered so “infamous” that it was not necessary to name her. In both cases, however, it is clear that later writers have simply assumed, from the conjunction of unknown poisoners and named poison, that the murderer’s name must have been Tofana.
This leaves only the puzzle of Keysler’s unambiguous description of “Tophana, the noted female poisoner” in gaol in Naples in 1730, and his assertion that “most strangers, out of Curiosity, go to see her.” In the circumstances, it is surely permissible to suggest that, whoever the mysterious prisoner of 1730 was, she may have been nicknamed after her infamous predecessor, or even appropriated Tofana’s name in order to benefit from the notoriety; after all, the poisoner’s numerous visitors must at least have provided her with distraction. More probably, they paid handsomely to hear her story.
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. To grasp how a single sensational court case dating to 1659 could have a lasting impact, and why Aqua Tofana itself was much discussed and so much feared, we next need to consider the broader reputation of Italians during this period – an era in which it was widely believed that they knew more about poisons, and poisoning, than any other people.
Masters of the art of poison
Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine (left), receives the head of Admiral Coligny, the leader of France’s protestants, after the country’s divisive Wars of Religion resulted in the murderous St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. Four years earlier, the cardinal had reportedly paid for a team of Italians to “empoison wine, wells and other victuals” used by his Huguenot enemies.
Late in the summer of 1568, Charles de Guise, the enigmatic cardinal of Lorraine, made a plan to end the divisive Wars of Religion that were beginning to tear France apart. According to a dispatch written by the English ambassador, the churchman sent to Italy for 50 expert poisoners, each of whom he paid 1,000 crowns “to empoison wine, wells, and other victuals” most likely to be used by his Protestant Huguenot enemies.
Fifty thousand crowns was an enormous sum, and though there are grounds to doubt the details – there was no mass poisoning of Huguenots at the time – the fact that the story was circulating in the highest diplomatic circles suggests that it was known and thought credible at the time. Certainly it is hard to imagine a better illustration of the reputation that Italians enjoyed during these years as masters of the art of poison. Most of Europe was united in the opinion that there was something uniquely skilful – and uniquely devilish – about the Italian way with lethal compounds. The English traveller Fynes Moryson wrote a few years later that “the Italyans above all other nations, most practise revenge by treasons, and espetially are skilful in making and giving poisons.” A French pamphlet, cited by Anne Somerset, asserted that “in Italy poisons were the surest and most common aids in relieving hate and vengeance.”
A reputed portrait of Lucrezia Borgia, the most infamous poisoner in a family renowned for poisoning.
The Italians’ reputation as keen poisoners can be traced back at least as far as the early 1400s and the amoral activities of Venice’s Council of 10. Later in the same century, the Borgia family grew notorious for its supposedly liberal use of a mysterious potion known as cantarella – “thought,” the Encyclopedia of Toxicology observes, “to have been a mixture of copper, arsenic, and phosphorus, prepared in the decaying carcass of a hog.” This – combined with Machiavelli’s notorious advocacy of politics as an art best practised with only cosmetic nods to morality – made it easy to believe the worst of scheming local rulers.
Contemporary sources certainly imply that Italians had dramatically extended the repertoire of poison. It was widely reported that it was possible to purchase concoctions in Florence or Rome that killed by touch or via inhalation, and that Italians knew how to poison clothing or bouquets of flowers. Cantarella was supposed to be subtle, precise and undetectable – precisely the same terms later used to describe Aqua Tofana. “At dinner,” the toxicologist Walter J. Decker notes,
a goblet of wine suitably treated … would be served, and death would result at the appointed time. The poison of the Borgias was reported to function with time-clock precision. It is said that a draught could be prepared that would kill in a day, a month, or a year, as desired.
Such stories were circulating years before the supposed invention of the Tofana poison. When Catherine de Medici moved to France in 1533 to marry King Henri III, she took with her a “perfumer,” Renat