Rome’s Most Notorious Marriage Counselor Had a 600-Husband Body Count

It’s that time of week where we tell you about the badly behaved foremothers that came before us, and today, we’re traveling back to 17th-century Italy—when Baroque art was king; when tomatoes were just barely foraying into the country’s culinary zeitgeist; and when unhappily married women would consult the help of Giulia Tofana… to have her poison their husbands. 

Similar to the centuries-old story of pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, Tofana’s life is mostly patchworked by varying historical accounts—including her own confession—and there’s limited knowledge on the full details of her life. What is known, however, is that she would eventually admit to killing at least 600 men. (Though he was born 136 years after her, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart also blamed her for his death, or rather the poison she created.) Damn. Hard to see someone else live out your dream.

Tofana is widely believed to have been born in Palermo, Sicily, around the late 16th century, allegedly to a mother who was eventually executed for poisoning her own husband. (Mom genes went hard.) Orphaned and wanting to escape her past, she found herself in Rome without a husband and with her daughter, in a society that sucked for women—though I guess we know a thing or two about that, too.

But at the time, women in Italy only really had three options: stay single and choose a life of sex work to make ends meet; get auctioned off to a probably unhappy marriage; or become a widow. So Tofana started helping women achieve the arguably most peaceful option.

With the help of her 30-something-year-old daughter and a local priest, Tofana created the “Spana network,” an underground coalition of poisoners that helped women commit mariticide. They built for themselves a reputation among unhappy women, who could consult them and receive a bottle of arsenic-laced “Aqua Tofana,” or an arsenic-laced concoction disguised as cosmetic oils and holy water. For the poison to work, it would be dropped into victims’ food and drink over a few days, with the sixth drop eventually landing the final blow. From the outside, the slow-burning murder looked like an incurable disease—which meant the clueless men would ensure their finances would go to their expectant widow before their death. 

Also involved in the Spana network were abortionists, midwives, and sorcerers—all of whom were said to have engaged in “black magic,” aka whatever doctors and priests didn’t understand anything about. 

It’s not exactly clear how or when Tofana got caught, but in some accounts, it happened when one of her clients regretted administering a few drops of Aqua Tofana into her husband’s soup. She stopped him from eating it, to which he apparently beat her until she confessed everything. Authorities then came after Tofana. She sought sanctuary in a church, but was extradited after a rumor came out that she was poisoning the water supply. 

She was arrested and taken to court, where four other women were also tried in what’s known today as the Spana Prosecution. By the end, she allegedly confessed to killing as many as 600 men, and was executed with her daughter in 1659. 

Today, Tofana holds less of a legacy than that of her poison, which made a resurgence in November 2024 under the widely shared slogan “Make Aqua Tofana Great Again” (MATGA)—a movement dedicated to fantasizing about lacing men’s drinks with poison, as a reaction to Trump’s second election win and the imminent threat he posed to abortion access. And, well… one of those manifested.

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