aqua toffana
It was the deadliest poison known to 17th century Europe: odourless, colourless, tasteless, lethal. As little as four drops was enough to kill the strongest man – and to do so in a way that no doctor could detect. They called it Aqua Tofana. But who invented it, who sold it... and did it even… 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. 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. 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. 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.” Giulia Tofana. Giulia Tofana (also spelled Toffana, Tophana) (died in Rome, July 1659) was an Italian professional poisoner. She was famous for selling poison to women who wanted to murder their husbands. She was the inventor of the famous poison Aqua Tofana, which is named after her. Aqua Tofana: slow-poisoning and husband-killing in 17th century Italy 6 April 2015 22 December 2017 / allkindsofhistory Detail from “The love potion”, by the nineteenth century Pre-Raphaelite Evelyn De Morgan. The tangled tale of Aqua Tofana is intimately connected to the “criminal magical underworlds” of the 17th century, which supplied love philtres, potions, medicines and poisons to a mostly female clientele. Aqua Toffana. 788 likes. Aqua Toffana, MC de l' West, nage dans le hip-hop depuis 2002. Grandement influencé par la Mafia K1 Fry, son but premier est... 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. Giulia Tofana was an Italian professional poisoner. She was famous for selling poison to women who wanted to murder their husbands. She was the inventor of the famous poison Aqua Tofana, which is named after her.
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.