Aqua Tofana
arsenic-based poison
Aqua Tofana (also known as Acqua Toffana and Aqua Tufania) was a strong, arsenic-based poison created in Sicily around 1630 that was reputedly widely used in Palermo, Naples, Perugia, and Rome, Italy, during the Renaissance. The name Aqua Tofana has evolved to refer to a category of slow poisons that are deadly but largely undetectable, just as Aqua Tofana was. These slow poisons may have been used frequently through the nineteenth century. It has been associated with Giulia Tofana, or Tofania, a woman from Palermo, purportedly the leader of a ring of six poisoners in Rome, who sold Aqua Tofana to Italian women who wanted to kill their husbands.
History
The first recorded mention of Aqua Tofana is from 1632–33 when it was used by two women, Francesca la Sarda and Teofania di Adamo, to poison their abusive husbands. It may have been invented by, and named after, Teofania. She was executed for her crimes, but several women associated with her, including Giulia Tofana (who may have been her daughter) and Gironima Spana, moved on to Rome and continued manufacturing and distributing the poison. Once in Rome, the women may have acquired the main ingredient, arsenic, from Father Girolamo of Sant'Agnese in Agone. Father Girolamo had access to this poison by way of his brother, who was an apothecary.
Women living during the Italian Renaissance desperately turned to Giulia Tofana, feeling that murder was their only way out of abusive marriages.
“Aqua Tofana” enters the record as arsenic-based poison. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Aqua, Tofana and arsenic-based can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Aqua Tofana” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.