September 8, 2020 • 26 mins
Giulia Tofana was an Italian apothecary known for her beauty, her secrecy and her poisonous proclivities. If the numbers are all to be believed, she may be the most successful serial killer you’ve never heard of.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda Land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to Criminalia.
I'm a Holly Fry and Marquis and this week we
are going to look at the life of Julia to Fauna,
an Italian apothecary known for her beauty, her secrecy, and
(00:24):
her poisonous proclivities. If the numbers are all to be believed,
she might be the most successful serial killer that you
have never heard of. But unlike many of the women
we've talked about and we'll talk about on this show,
Julia wasn't in it for a personal power grap She's
best known as having invented a famous poison called Akuata fauna,
(00:45):
and that perhaps sounds more like a light submarine fragrance
rather than what it really was, because it was a
deadly potion laced with arsenic belladonna and lead that she
sold two hundreds of women. Those are primarily women who
wanted to escape dangerous marriages, and when we say dangerous,
we are talking about abuse. So let's set her scene.
(01:06):
This was during the Italian Renaissance, which was an era
of enlightenment and achievement between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries,
but not for women. For women, this was still really
a dark time of arranged marriage, and that was marriage
that did not have a possibility of divorce. No matter
what the situation, women found themselves with no financial or
(01:28):
social power, and they really only had a few available options.
So one they could get married, Two they could stay
single and rely on something like sex work to survive.
Or three they could become a well off widow, which
naturally required option one to happen first. Often, marriages at
(01:48):
this time were decided based on how the families financial
or political interests aligned. Love was really not part of
the equation at all. Not only did women not have
a say regarding who they were married to, they were
also considered legally subject to their husband's and a husband
could beat his wife without any fear of punishment. So
(02:09):
the only way out was to become a widow. Although
many women at this time were skilled in making some
common medicinal home remedies are Julius spent a lot of
time in and out of apothecaries, watching and learning as
they made their medicines and potions, so by this time,
for instance, in an an apothecary would know remedies like
how to treat heartburn with chalk, which is really similar
(02:30):
to how we treat it with Tom's Uh, it doesn't
just taste like chalk because of coincidence. Eventually, Julia ran
her own apothecary and developed her own potions. So up
until roughly the nineteenth century, apothecaries were kind of like
the common ancestor to our modern day pharmacies, hospitals, and
perhaps surprisingly our modern day liquor stores. Unlike today's pharmacists, though,
(02:53):
apothecaries would also distill, mix and prescribe both medications and
alcohol right there in house, and when tobacco was commonly
used in medical treatment, it too was sold through an apothecary.
So an apothecary had to have a combination of talents
and skills, including being a general physician, surgeon, dentist, obstetrician, optometrist.
(03:14):
The list just keeps going, um, But in this role,
they were available to provide medical advice and treatments to
the general public who wouldn't normally have access to such
a thing. In addition to preparing treatments, they also typically
sold the ingredients you'd need to make up a home
remedy as well as prepared goods and herbal medicines, and
they often took on apprentices and they trained both men
(03:36):
and women in the field. So, if he'll indulge us,
we'd like to go down a quick rabbit hole on
apothecary history, because the actual origins of this particular service
go way back, and you could debate where exactly on
the timeline it starts. Yeah, we know that as early
as two thousand BC, Ambersia now of China was prioritizing
(03:57):
the examination and the cataloging of hundreds of samples from nature,
so think of herbs, barks, roots, in order to develop
a database of how such things could be used medicinally.
Mesopotamia similarly had proto apothecaries figuring out how to extract
and combine and dose natural elements to address countless issues.
(04:20):
And they were recording all of this and in the
mid fifteen hundreds d c. And estimated eight hundred different
prescriptions were inscribed on the Ebbers pavirus in Egypt. At
that time, formulas are compounding medications were recorded, serving as
the ancestors to our modern day medicine. Ancient Egypt also
established and codified a hierarchy of professionals in the apothecary field.
(04:43):
So one class of job was defined for gathering, another
for compounding, and then there was a third category that
was the chief pharmacists. So I think it's fairly safe
to consider that an apothecary at this point. Right right
by the year one d c e. The idea of
(05:03):
a pharmacist botanist existed in the form of Greece's Padanias Discorides,
who wrote five volumes of books outlining the compounding and
uses of ointments, the uses of animal derived products in medicine,
and a fairly comprehensive god to botanicals and their uses
for treating maladies of almost every imaginable type, as well
as what sorts of vessels and containers were best for
(05:25):
holding all of these things, because that's important too. Yeah. Yeah.
He made notes about, like, things will go bad if
you store them in this kind of container. Store this
only in this kind of contain a lid. You know, well,
saran wrap, it'll be great. Um. And the first establishments
that you would probably consider a drug store actually popped
(05:47):
up in Baghdad in the late eighth century, where both
medicines and confections of various kinds, including everything you would
need to make cocktails, so they weren't called that at
the time would be found. That's fantastic. The pharmacological field
and Europe really got a boost in the thirteenth century
when Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Second introduced a series of
(06:07):
regulations into the field, and that started in the Kingdom
of Two Sicilies, which is what we would point to
today as Italy and Sicily. And at this point pharmacists
there started to be governed not only by regulations that
were put into effect by Frederick the Second, but they
also had to take an oath that they would not
exploit patients and that the drugs that they prepared were
(06:28):
both uniform and reliable. Well, the concept of a public
pharmacy spread rapidly throughout Europe from that point in the
Kingdom of Two Sicilies. It's not surprising that fifteenth century Italy,
especially in forward thinking Florence specifically, was where the first
Farm of Copia was written, called the Nuevo Receiptorio. And
during the Renaissance as well, nuns were learning and practicing
(06:49):
apothecary medicine in Italian convents, and they had a pretty
decent reputation among the medical community. So all of this
is to say that Julie was part of a law
understanding tradition of offering apothecary and pharmacology in history and
specifically in Italian history. And we're going to get a
whole lot deeper into her story, but before we do,
we're gonna take a quick break. Welcome back to Criminalia.
(07:18):
So after becoming a widower herself, and we don't actually
know if it was through poison or other circumstance, Julia
and her daughter Girolama moved from Sicily to Naples and
eventually settled in Rome. References to the elixir that she's
credited with inventing, Aquata fauna um, have always been closely
associated with Rome and Naples, but not necessarily Sicily. So
(07:40):
it's in Rome when we first encounter her and her work,
and the first recorded mention of aquaita fauna, which actually
translates simply to to fauna water, can be traced to
either sixteen thirty two or sixteen thirty three. And while
the ingredients of arsenic lead and belladonna were well known
at this time, exactly how those things were blended into
(08:01):
a clear, tasteless liquid has been lost to the ages,
and I would say that's probably a good thing. Probably
probably yes, uh all, Julia was an apothecary. She probably
wasn't running a public pharmacy. She was known to be
discreet and worked mostly by referrals. And though the information
about her background is pretty sparse, we do know that
(08:22):
she was born in Sicily, in the city of Palermo,
in sixteen twenty, so if you do that math those
sixteen thirties references to Aquata Fano, she would have been
still a young teenager when she was starting to develop
and pedal that. Yes, she was probably the daughter of
Teofania di Adamo, an apothecary who made and sold herbal medicines, cosmetics, perfumes,
(08:44):
and other potions and poisons. It's a little bit hard
to know for sure, but it is not unheard of
for a poison to be sold as a perfume. And
in fact, in Sanskrit, the word for red arsenic, is
the same word that used for perfume, so those two
words have a history of being linked, and they may
(09:05):
well have been used to cover the trade of toxic substances.
In sixty three, Julia's mother, Tiofanio, was accused of murdering
her husband, and she was ultimately executed um if the
cause of his death was poison, though that's not recorded anywhere.
(09:29):
So at this point Julia was on her own, an orphan.
Her father was killed, presumably by her mother based on
what the courts found, and her mother had been put
to death. But Julia was armed with the knowledge of
an apothecary, and eventually also armed with the help of
her daughter and a small group of trusted associates, and
with all of that backing her up, Julia built her
(09:51):
own reputation in Rome as a friend too abused women,
all under the cloak of being a perfectly benign apothecary.
The usual assortment of tinctures, medicines and beauty products. There's
really nothing to see here, right, Like the bottles all
have lids on them. It was brilliant, really, what she
(10:15):
was doing. If anyone questioned the nature of Julia's business,
she could just point to bottles of her popular face
creams and powders. It appeared she sold cosmetics, and Aquatafano
was packaged in such a way that it could be
easily blended in on a woman's vanity, beside her makeup
and creams and perfumes and a true bit of genius design.
I feel like on my vanity no one could find
anything anything, It's a mess. It all blends. I guarantee
(10:40):
that the Italian women felt the same way. They're like, yeah,
find the poison and like we should be super clear.
There was plenty of toxic stuff in use in Rome
at this time that was just considered normal to have
in your household. Right. This was a period of time
when arsenic and lead were commonly used in facial powders
as skin eight Nurse and Belladonna, which if you even
(11:03):
have rudimentary Italian skills you know means beautiful woman was
used in eye drops as a way to dilate a
person's pupils and make a woman's eyes look more dough
like and therefore more alluring. Of course, this all had
to do with careful dosage, dosage and intention, right. Julia's
(11:25):
cleverly packaged poison product could be disguised in one of
two ways. It could either be made to look like
a cosmetic powder, or it could be sold in vials
as a devotional object. Called Mana of St. Nicholas of Bari,
which was actually a very popular healing oil for blemishes
at the time. Aquatafana itself was a slow acting mixture
(11:47):
that was easily mixed into water wine. I mean, it
didn't have to be liquid. It could be any food
that you wanted to put it into. Four small doses
was what Julia recommended to kill a husband, and she
wanted you to spread them apart slowly, as if to
plan the victim's time of death or just give him
time to write his will. Probably also it looked less
suspicious if it was like, I don't know, he's been
(12:08):
ailing for a while. So with the first dose, the
way this worked was that the victim would likely develop
some cold like symptoms, such as fatigue or weakness, and
then the second dose would intensify those symptoms. But by
the third dose the person would be quite ill, with
symptoms including vomiting and diarrhea, which we see a lot
with arsenic dehydration and a and a burning sensation throughout
(12:30):
the digestive system, which would be similar to heartburn, but
much much worse than heartburn. The fourth dose would be,
of course, the lethal dose, although Julia and her associates
were really good at keeping a low profile. You can't,
of course, trust that all your clients will do so
as well. Uh, this is you know, common knowledge, right.
(12:52):
The more people that know a secret, the more likely
it is that it will get out. And the way
Julia was caught goes something like this. So in the end,
Julia's business practices were revealed to the authorities by one
of her own customers. This was a woman who had
laced her husband's dinner with a drop of aquita fauna.
(13:12):
But then she had a change of heart about things,
so there would be poison or beg your husband not
to eat the tainted soup she had prepared. Now, once
she had confessed to her husband that his soup was
in fact poisoned, he understandably ted her into the authorities. Listen,
nobody knows what a relationship is like from the outside exactly.
(13:34):
But then the authorities took her in and she confessed
to the authorities, under extreme torture, that she had bought
her bottle of aquita fauna from Julia. So keep in
mind here that Julia was well liked. I mean, she
had helped a lot of women in their situations. It
was probably also in her client's best interests to keep
Julia off of the authority's torture table. So when word
(13:57):
got out that her apothecary had been exposed for selling poison,
locals were quick to help Julia escape to a church. Um.
There's an alternate story that she fled to a convent,
which is totally plausible. Um. Either way, she was granted
sanctuary while authorities searched for her. Yeah, Maria made an
astute comment as we were talking about this case that
(14:18):
that connection of nuns being associated with apothecary and respected
by the medical community kind of ties in like, of
course they might take in someone like Julia. But as
is often the case, this story kind of exploded and
rumors started to flare up, and those rumors got bigger
and bigger. And then after a rumor claiming that she
(14:40):
had poisoned Rome's water supply caught on throughout the city,
the police forced their way into the church and detained Julia.
It's said that, under accounts of extreme torture, she confessed
to providing the poison to kill as many as six
hundred men in Rome between the years sixteen thirty three.
And sixteen fifty one. But can sitaring it was a
(15:00):
confession given under torture, she probably would have also confessed
to the future assassination of Abraham Lincoln or maybe too
being a duck. I mean, it's hard to know exactly
what her truth was. Confessions extracted through torture are not
really trustworthy. Um, while we are pretty sure she was
not innocent and also that she was not a duck. Uh,
(15:23):
there could be a version of this story where Julia
could have been selling harmless cosmetics and face creams at
her apothecary when she was wrongfully accused of murderous intentions.
There's also part of me that wonders if she isn't like, hey,
I'm not mixing it, but do you know that the
stuff in your face cream is actually poisonous and maybe
you could use it for that reason. I wondered the
(15:43):
same thing right where she was like, it comes in
oil and it comes in powder, but if you put
the two together, right. But in sixteen hundreds Italy, those
(16:04):
torture confessions were good enough evidence to convict on Julia
and her daughter, along with her accomplices that worked at
her store, So they may have just been employees. We're
all executed in Rome in the Campo de Fiori, or
they were strangled by a mob. The specifics dipper among
the story accounts, and because Julia's story is so sensational,
(16:26):
there was a lot of variation in the accounts about her,
and some of Julia's clientele who had used Aquatafano were
also arrested. Some, perhaps as many as forty, were executed
just like Julia herself. Others were, it is told again,
so this is unsubstantiated bricked into the dungeons of the
(16:48):
Palazzo Pucci. But considering that that is in Florence and
not Rome, that particular version of the story is highly unlikely.
What's interesting is it comes up a lot like there
wouldn't have been like a a really good like reason
for them to be bricked in in Florence. It seems
so strange from an account, but okay, you know, maybe
(17:09):
it was I don't know. Um. Upper class women, however,
who were accused of using her product were said to
have escaped punishment, at least mostly mainly by virtue of
being an upper class woman, but many feigned shock upon
learning their quote unquote cosmetics were actually poisonous, and that's
(17:30):
actually a plausible excuse because, as we talked about earlier,
in seventeenth century Italy, a lot of cosmetics did have
arsenic and belladonna as just a regular ingredient. We're going
to talk more about why Julia tafauna story still resonates,
but first we'll have a little bit of a pause.
I'm here from my sponsor. Welcome back to Criminalien. What's
(18:04):
interesting is that more than a hundred years after her death,
Julia to Fauna's legacy has still survived, and by brand
name too. That is the kind of reach most companies
today would kill for no pun intended. And there is
even a high profile story about the use of Aquata
fauna a century after Julia's death, and while almost all
(18:28):
historians since the eighteenth century have dismissed this as pure
gossip and rumor, according to some accounts at the time,
Mozart feared on his deathbed in seventeen ninety one that
he had been poisoned, and likely by his colleague and
rival Antonio Salieri, saying quote, I feel that I will
not last much longer. I am sure that I have
(18:50):
been poisoned. I cannot rid myself of this idea. Someone
has given me aquata fauna and what are the interesting things?
Is like all of the instances where you read his quote,
sometimes this is a little longer, sometimes it's a little shorter.
It always mentions aquata fauna like by name. But in
(19:12):
truth it's it's so highly unlikely that Mozart was poisoned
by anyone, Sally Area or or his maide. You know, um,
there's just no evidence to support his wild claim, although
he may have really truly believed he felt like he'd
been poisoned. Today most studies UM and historians point to
actually a possible strep infection that had gone too far,
(19:35):
which can lead to complications of rheumatic fever um. They
also point to possible tricken noses from eating undercooked pork um,
and he had been having really terrible headaches near his
his death, and they attribute that to possibly having been
a subdural hematoma. Now, Mozart was not the only eighteenth
century figure that was worried about aquata fauna. Pope Clement
(19:59):
the fourteenth lived his final year in fairly poor health,
with depression and also a fear of assassination. In fact,
following his death in seventeen seventy four, rumors circulated that
he had indeed been poisoned ultimately, though an autopsy determined
that he had died of natural causes. So julius legacy
(20:20):
is clearly kind of an interesting one. While her life
story is often billed as a tale of a woman
who killed more than six hundred men, when you look
more closely, what emerges is the case that looks a
little bit more like she she felt she had a
personal calling in helping women out of abusive situations. Yeah.
I always wonder if it goes back to her mother
and whatever was going on in that marriage. I wonder
(20:41):
that too, And we will never know what the truth
was there. Uh. And certainly we don't have hard evidence
regarding whether all of her clients were after akwatafauna or
they really just needed her assistance with fine lines and wrinkles.
It's not as though we have some handy dandy dust
statistic tables regarding fatalities in Rome in the mid seventeenth century,
(21:02):
categorized by sex and cause of death that we could
use to compare her story against. But we can look
at some modern statistics. As we look at Julia's story,
like the fact that, according to the National Coalition Against
Domestic Violence, twenty people in the United States are physically
abused by an intimate partner per minute per minute. Like,
(21:24):
stop and let that sink in for a second. It's
just into the United States, and it's not a problem
just in the United States. According to the World Health Organization,
around the world, almost of women, it's a third of
all women globally who have been in a relationship report
that they have experienced some form of violence by their
(21:45):
internet partner in their lifetime. That is literally just the
tip of the iceberg when considering the modern domestic violence story.
But when you think about that and all of the
ramifications of it, it starts to become even clearer why
Julia Tafauna emerges as a sort of folk hero in
some modern tellings of her story. And that's even with
(22:06):
so many gaps in terms of details about her life
and work, you can still see where the fascination comes
from and why the idea of a woman who was
kind of a badass becomes even more compelling when the
possibility is introduced that she was using her skills and
knowledge of botany and pharmacology to offer a means of empowerment.
I mean, I'll be illegal, to be sure, to the
(22:28):
women of the seventeenth century in Rome. Yeah, Julia, and
I know you love her. I love Julia because I
really she stood out to me as being one of
these women who we absolutely needed to keep on our
list because she wasn't in it for the politics of anything.
She seemed to be truly involved in this for the
(22:49):
benefit of other women, and that that's just cool. Hey, Holly,
what's your poison this week? Well? Uh, this is actually
I feel like it should be your poison because you
pointed out this recipe to me. Oh and the Italian
Sicilian is of it is is kind of heavy as well,
(23:11):
right right, You pointed me at a recipe for a
cocktail called a pimpanilla, which because I had to click
on that, right, and how could you not? Uh So,
this particular cocktail features one point five ounces of grappa,
an ounce of freshly squeezed lime juice, three quarters of
(23:32):
an ounce of Annas syrup, and one quarter of announce
of Saint germains. So there's also a lot of accoutremal
in the original recipe. There's some really fancy pants unicorn
Um salt for the rim that you can make that
is a lemon rosemary salt. I did not do that.
I went the simple route. I also didn't like garnish
(23:53):
it with an Annis pod, and I didn't even though
I have a beautiful rosemary bush right outside my front door.
Did I go out and get one to arnish it with? No?
I did not. I just wanted to get it in
the shaker and go to town. I expected to hate
this cocktail. I know you did. Like everything about this
cocktail is everything that I like, and I'm not the
way you're drank it, right. It's one of those things where, um,
(24:16):
I mean my my proclivities are usually towards something kind
of like soft and light. I don't like a particularly
fancy drink usually, like my go to is vodka and
diet coke. I'm a very basic person. Now. Granted, if
you don't like liquorice flavor because of the Annis, yes,
not going to be your jam, right. But it was
(24:37):
delightful And I love the Chair Liquorice Girl as well
well because the lime juice, the Annis and then the
Saint Germain is the magic trick like it it is
the thing that holds the whole thing together and like
takes all of the things, the characteristics of each of
the spirits or ingredients that you wouldn't enjoy, and it
(25:00):
just makes them kiss each other in a nice little way. Now,
is that that's elderflower, isn't it It is? That's another
one that's going to go into regular rotation at the fryhouse. Fantastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The pimpanella. If you just google that, you're going to
get this recipe and it's quite yummy. And then, uh,
I like that they call it a sprints. It's a sprints.
(25:22):
It's a sprints. It is. It's for you know, to
pretend that you're in Italy enjoying a beautiful, beautiful sunny day.
We hope that you like us. You're here to the end,
So thank you for listening to Criminalia, and if you
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(25:46):
Shonda Land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. For
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Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda Land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to Criminalia.
I'm a Holly Fry and Marquis and this week we
are going to look at the life of Julia to Fauna,
an Italian apothecary known for her beauty, her secrecy, and
(00:24):
her poisonous proclivities. If the numbers are all to be believed,
she might be the most successful serial killer that you
have never heard of. But unlike many of the women
we've talked about and we'll talk about on this show,
Julia wasn't in it for a personal power grap She's
best known as having invented a famous poison called Akuata fauna,
(00:45):
and that perhaps sounds more like a light submarine fragrance
rather than what it really was, because it was a
deadly potion laced with arsenic belladonna and lead that she
sold two hundreds of women. Those are primarily women who
wanted to escape dangerous marriages, and when we say dangerous,
we are talking about abuse. So let's set her scene.
(01:06):
This was during the Italian Renaissance, which was an era
of enlightenment and achievement between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries,
but not for women. For women, this was still really
a dark time of arranged marriage, and that was marriage
that did not have a possibility of divorce. No matter
what the situation, women found themselves with no financial or
(01:28):
social power, and they really only had a few available options.
So one they could get married, Two they could stay
single and rely on something like sex work to survive.
Or three they could become a well off widow, which
naturally required option one to happen first. Often, marriages at
(01:48):
this time were decided based on how the families financial
or political interests aligned. Love was really not part of
the equation at all. Not only did women not have
a say regarding who they were married to, they were
also considered legally subject to their husband's and a husband
could beat his wife without any fear of punishment. So
(02:09):
the only way out was to become a widow. Although
many women at this time were skilled in making some
common medicinal home remedies are Julius spent a lot of
time in and out of apothecaries, watching and learning as
they made their medicines and potions, so by this time,
for instance, in an an apothecary would know remedies like
how to treat heartburn with chalk, which is really similar
(02:30):
to how we treat it with Tom's Uh, it doesn't
just taste like chalk because of coincidence. Eventually, Julia ran
her own apothecary and developed her own potions. So up
until roughly the nineteenth century, apothecaries were kind of like
the common ancestor to our modern day pharmacies, hospitals, and
perhaps surprisingly our modern day liquor stores. Unlike today's pharmacists, though,
(02:53):
apothecaries would also distill, mix and prescribe both medications and
alcohol right there in house, and when tobacco was commonly
used in medical treatment, it too was sold through an apothecary.
So an apothecary had to have a combination of talents
and skills, including being a general physician, surgeon, dentist, obstetrician, optometrist.
(03:14):
The list just keeps going, um, But in this role,
they were available to provide medical advice and treatments to
the general public who wouldn't normally have access to such
a thing. In addition to preparing treatments, they also typically
sold the ingredients you'd need to make up a home
remedy as well as prepared goods and herbal medicines, and
they often took on apprentices and they trained both men
(03:36):
and women in the field. So, if he'll indulge us,
we'd like to go down a quick rabbit hole on
apothecary history, because the actual origins of this particular service
go way back, and you could debate where exactly on
the timeline it starts. Yeah, we know that as early
as two thousand BC, Ambersia now of China was prioritizing
(03:57):
the examination and the cataloging of hundreds of samples from nature,
so think of herbs, barks, roots, in order to develop
a database of how such things could be used medicinally.
Mesopotamia similarly had proto apothecaries figuring out how to extract
and combine and dose natural elements to address countless issues.
(04:20):
And they were recording all of this and in the
mid fifteen hundreds d c. And estimated eight hundred different
prescriptions were inscribed on the Ebbers pavirus in Egypt. At
that time, formulas are compounding medications were recorded, serving as
the ancestors to our modern day medicine. Ancient Egypt also
established and codified a hierarchy of professionals in the apothecary field.
(04:43):
So one class of job was defined for gathering, another
for compounding, and then there was a third category that
was the chief pharmacists. So I think it's fairly safe
to consider that an apothecary at this point. Right right
by the year one d c e. The idea of
(05:03):
a pharmacist botanist existed in the form of Greece's Padanias Discorides,
who wrote five volumes of books outlining the compounding and
uses of ointments, the uses of animal derived products in medicine,
and a fairly comprehensive god to botanicals and their uses
for treating maladies of almost every imaginable type, as well
as what sorts of vessels and containers were best for
(05:25):
holding all of these things, because that's important too. Yeah. Yeah.
He made notes about, like, things will go bad if
you store them in this kind of container. Store this
only in this kind of contain a lid. You know, well,
saran wrap, it'll be great. Um. And the first establishments
that you would probably consider a drug store actually popped
(05:47):
up in Baghdad in the late eighth century, where both
medicines and confections of various kinds, including everything you would
need to make cocktails, so they weren't called that at
the time would be found. That's fantastic. The pharmacological field
and Europe really got a boost in the thirteenth century
when Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Second introduced a series of
(06:07):
regulations into the field, and that started in the Kingdom
of Two Sicilies, which is what we would point to
today as Italy and Sicily. And at this point pharmacists
there started to be governed not only by regulations that
were put into effect by Frederick the Second, but they
also had to take an oath that they would not
exploit patients and that the drugs that they prepared were
(06:28):
both uniform and reliable. Well, the concept of a public
pharmacy spread rapidly throughout Europe from that point in the
Kingdom of Two Sicilies. It's not surprising that fifteenth century Italy,
especially in forward thinking Florence specifically, was where the first
Farm of Copia was written, called the Nuevo Receiptorio. And
during the Renaissance as well, nuns were learning and practicing
(06:49):
apothecary medicine in Italian convents, and they had a pretty
decent reputation among the medical community. So all of this
is to say that Julie was part of a law
understanding tradition of offering apothecary and pharmacology in history and
specifically in Italian history. And we're going to get a
whole lot deeper into her story, but before we do,
we're gonna take a quick break. Welcome back to Criminalia.
(07:18):
So after becoming a widower herself, and we don't actually
know if it was through poison or other circumstance, Julia
and her daughter Girolama moved from Sicily to Naples and
eventually settled in Rome. References to the elixir that she's
credited with inventing, Aquata fauna um, have always been closely
associated with Rome and Naples, but not necessarily Sicily. So
(07:40):
it's in Rome when we first encounter her and her work,
and the first recorded mention of aquaita fauna, which actually
translates simply to to fauna water, can be traced to
either sixteen thirty two or sixteen thirty three. And while
the ingredients of arsenic lead and belladonna were well known
at this time, exactly how those things were blended into
(08:01):
a clear, tasteless liquid has been lost to the ages,
and I would say that's probably a good thing. Probably
probably yes, uh all, Julia was an apothecary. She probably
wasn't running a public pharmacy. She was known to be
discreet and worked mostly by referrals. And though the information
about her background is pretty sparse, we do know that
(08:22):
she was born in Sicily, in the city of Palermo,
in sixteen twenty, so if you do that math those
sixteen thirties references to Aquata Fano, she would have been
still a young teenager when she was starting to develop
and pedal that. Yes, she was probably the daughter of
Teofania di Adamo, an apothecary who made and sold herbal medicines, cosmetics, perfumes,
(08:44):
and other potions and poisons. It's a little bit hard
to know for sure, but it is not unheard of
for a poison to be sold as a perfume. And
in fact, in Sanskrit, the word for red arsenic, is
the same word that used for perfume, so those two
words have a history of being linked, and they may
(09:05):
well have been used to cover the trade of toxic substances.
In sixty three, Julia's mother, Tiofanio, was accused of murdering
her husband, and she was ultimately executed um if the
cause of his death was poison, though that's not recorded anywhere.
(09:29):
So at this point Julia was on her own, an orphan.
Her father was killed, presumably by her mother based on
what the courts found, and her mother had been put
to death. But Julia was armed with the knowledge of
an apothecary, and eventually also armed with the help of
her daughter and a small group of trusted associates, and
with all of that backing her up, Julia built her
(09:51):
own reputation in Rome as a friend too abused women,
all under the cloak of being a perfectly benign apothecary.
The usual assortment of tinctures, medicines and beauty products. There's
really nothing to see here, right, Like the bottles all
have lids on them. It was brilliant, really, what she
(10:15):
was doing. If anyone questioned the nature of Julia's business,
she could just point to bottles of her popular face
creams and powders. It appeared she sold cosmetics, and Aquatafano
was packaged in such a way that it could be
easily blended in on a woman's vanity, beside her makeup
and creams and perfumes and a true bit of genius design.
I feel like on my vanity no one could find
anything anything, It's a mess. It all blends. I guarantee
(10:40):
that the Italian women felt the same way. They're like, yeah,
find the poison and like we should be super clear.
There was plenty of toxic stuff in use in Rome
at this time that was just considered normal to have
in your household. Right. This was a period of time
when arsenic and lead were commonly used in facial powders
as skin eight Nurse and Belladonna, which if you even
(11:03):
have rudimentary Italian skills you know means beautiful woman was
used in eye drops as a way to dilate a
person's pupils and make a woman's eyes look more dough
like and therefore more alluring. Of course, this all had
to do with careful dosage, dosage and intention, right. Julia's
(11:25):
cleverly packaged poison product could be disguised in one of
two ways. It could either be made to look like
a cosmetic powder, or it could be sold in vials
as a devotional object. Called Mana of St. Nicholas of Bari,
which was actually a very popular healing oil for blemishes
at the time. Aquatafana itself was a slow acting mixture
(11:47):
that was easily mixed into water wine. I mean, it
didn't have to be liquid. It could be any food
that you wanted to put it into. Four small doses
was what Julia recommended to kill a husband, and she
wanted you to spread them apart slowly, as if to
plan the victim's time of death or just give him
time to write his will. Probably also it looked less
suspicious if it was like, I don't know, he's been
(12:08):
ailing for a while. So with the first dose, the
way this worked was that the victim would likely develop
some cold like symptoms, such as fatigue or weakness, and
then the second dose would intensify those symptoms. But by
the third dose the person would be quite ill, with
symptoms including vomiting and diarrhea, which we see a lot
with arsenic dehydration and a and a burning sensation throughout
(12:30):
the digestive system, which would be similar to heartburn, but
much much worse than heartburn. The fourth dose would be,
of course, the lethal dose, although Julia and her associates
were really good at keeping a low profile. You can't,
of course, trust that all your clients will do so
as well. Uh, this is you know, common knowledge, right.
(12:52):
The more people that know a secret, the more likely
it is that it will get out. And the way
Julia was caught goes something like this. So in the end,
Julia's business practices were revealed to the authorities by one
of her own customers. This was a woman who had
laced her husband's dinner with a drop of aquita fauna.
(13:12):
But then she had a change of heart about things,
so there would be poison or beg your husband not
to eat the tainted soup she had prepared. Now, once
she had confessed to her husband that his soup was
in fact poisoned, he understandably ted her into the authorities. Listen,
nobody knows what a relationship is like from the outside exactly.
(13:34):
But then the authorities took her in and she confessed
to the authorities, under extreme torture, that she had bought
her bottle of aquita fauna from Julia. So keep in
mind here that Julia was well liked. I mean, she
had helped a lot of women in their situations. It
was probably also in her client's best interests to keep
Julia off of the authority's torture table. So when word
(13:57):
got out that her apothecary had been exposed for selling poison,
locals were quick to help Julia escape to a church. Um.
There's an alternate story that she fled to a convent,
which is totally plausible. Um. Either way, she was granted
sanctuary while authorities searched for her. Yeah, Maria made an
astute comment as we were talking about this case that
(14:18):
that connection of nuns being associated with apothecary and respected
by the medical community kind of ties in like, of
course they might take in someone like Julia. But as
is often the case, this story kind of exploded and
rumors started to flare up, and those rumors got bigger
and bigger. And then after a rumor claiming that she
(14:40):
had poisoned Rome's water supply caught on throughout the city,
the police forced their way into the church and detained Julia.
It's said that, under accounts of extreme torture, she confessed
to providing the poison to kill as many as six
hundred men in Rome between the years sixteen thirty three.
And sixteen fifty one. But can sitaring it was a
(15:00):
confession given under torture, she probably would have also confessed
to the future assassination of Abraham Lincoln or maybe too
being a duck. I mean, it's hard to know exactly
what her truth was. Confessions extracted through torture are not
really trustworthy. Um, while we are pretty sure she was
not innocent and also that she was not a duck. Uh,
(15:23):
there could be a version of this story where Julia
could have been selling harmless cosmetics and face creams at
her apothecary when she was wrongfully accused of murderous intentions.
There's also part of me that wonders if she isn't like, hey,
I'm not mixing it, but do you know that the
stuff in your face cream is actually poisonous and maybe
you could use it for that reason. I wondered the
(15:43):
same thing right where she was like, it comes in
oil and it comes in powder, but if you put
the two together, right. But in sixteen hundreds Italy, those
(16:04):
torture confessions were good enough evidence to convict on Julia
and her daughter, along with her accomplices that worked at
her store, So they may have just been employees. We're
all executed in Rome in the Campo de Fiori, or
they were strangled by a mob. The specifics dipper among
the story accounts, and because Julia's story is so sensational,
(16:26):
there was a lot of variation in the accounts about her,
and some of Julia's clientele who had used Aquatafano were
also arrested. Some, perhaps as many as forty, were executed
just like Julia herself. Others were, it is told again,
so this is unsubstantiated bricked into the dungeons of the
(16:48):
Palazzo Pucci. But considering that that is in Florence and
not Rome, that particular version of the story is highly unlikely.
What's interesting is it comes up a lot like there
wouldn't have been like a a really good like reason
for them to be bricked in in Florence. It seems
so strange from an account, but okay, you know, maybe
(17:09):
it was I don't know. Um. Upper class women, however,
who were accused of using her product were said to
have escaped punishment, at least mostly mainly by virtue of
being an upper class woman, but many feigned shock upon
learning their quote unquote cosmetics were actually poisonous, and that's
(17:30):
actually a plausible excuse because, as we talked about earlier,
in seventeenth century Italy, a lot of cosmetics did have
arsenic and belladonna as just a regular ingredient. We're going
to talk more about why Julia tafauna story still resonates,
but first we'll have a little bit of a pause.
I'm here from my sponsor. Welcome back to Criminalien. What's
(18:04):
interesting is that more than a hundred years after her death,
Julia to Fauna's legacy has still survived, and by brand
name too. That is the kind of reach most companies
today would kill for no pun intended. And there is
even a high profile story about the use of Aquata
fauna a century after Julia's death, and while almost all
(18:28):
historians since the eighteenth century have dismissed this as pure
gossip and rumor, according to some accounts at the time,
Mozart feared on his deathbed in seventeen ninety one that
he had been poisoned, and likely by his colleague and
rival Antonio Salieri, saying quote, I feel that I will
not last much longer. I am sure that I have
(18:50):
been poisoned. I cannot rid myself of this idea. Someone
has given me aquata fauna and what are the interesting things?
Is like all of the instances where you read his quote,
sometimes this is a little longer, sometimes it's a little shorter.
It always mentions aquata fauna like by name. But in
(19:12):
truth it's it's so highly unlikely that Mozart was poisoned
by anyone, Sally Area or or his maide. You know, um,
there's just no evidence to support his wild claim, although
he may have really truly believed he felt like he'd
been poisoned. Today most studies UM and historians point to
actually a possible strep infection that had gone too far,
(19:35):
which can lead to complications of rheumatic fever um. They
also point to possible tricken noses from eating undercooked pork um,
and he had been having really terrible headaches near his
his death, and they attribute that to possibly having been
a subdural hematoma. Now, Mozart was not the only eighteenth
century figure that was worried about aquata fauna. Pope Clement
(19:59):
the fourteenth lived his final year in fairly poor health,
with depression and also a fear of assassination. In fact,
following his death in seventeen seventy four, rumors circulated that
he had indeed been poisoned ultimately, though an autopsy determined
that he had died of natural causes. So julius legacy
(20:20):
is clearly kind of an interesting one. While her life
story is often billed as a tale of a woman
who killed more than six hundred men, when you look
more closely, what emerges is the case that looks a
little bit more like she she felt she had a
personal calling in helping women out of abusive situations. Yeah.
I always wonder if it goes back to her mother
and whatever was going on in that marriage. I wonder
(20:41):
that too, And we will never know what the truth
was there. Uh. And certainly we don't have hard evidence
regarding whether all of her clients were after akwatafauna or
they really just needed her assistance with fine lines and wrinkles.
It's not as though we have some handy dandy dust
statistic tables regarding fatalities in Rome in the mid seventeenth century,
(21:02):
categorized by sex and cause of death that we could
use to compare her story against. But we can look
at some modern statistics. As we look at Julia's story,
like the fact that, according to the National Coalition Against
Domestic Violence, twenty people in the United States are physically
abused by an intimate partner per minute per minute. Like,
(21:24):
stop and let that sink in for a second. It's
just into the United States, and it's not a problem
just in the United States. According to the World Health Organization,
around the world, almost of women, it's a third of
all women globally who have been in a relationship report
that they have experienced some form of violence by their
(21:45):
internet partner in their lifetime. That is literally just the
tip of the iceberg when considering the modern domestic violence story.
But when you think about that and all of the
ramifications of it, it starts to become even clearer why
Julia Tafauna emerges as a sort of folk hero in
some modern tellings of her story. And that's even with
(22:06):
so many gaps in terms of details about her life
and work, you can still see where the fascination comes
from and why the idea of a woman who was
kind of a badass becomes even more compelling when the
possibility is introduced that she was using her skills and
knowledge of botany and pharmacology to offer a means of empowerment.
I mean, I'll be illegal, to be sure, to the
(22:28):
women of the seventeenth century in Rome. Yeah, Julia, and
I know you love her. I love Julia because I
really she stood out to me as being one of
these women who we absolutely needed to keep on our
list because she wasn't in it for the politics of anything.
She seemed to be truly involved in this for the
(22:49):
benefit of other women, and that that's just cool. Hey, Holly,
what's your poison this week? Well? Uh, this is actually
I feel like it should be your poison because you
pointed out this recipe to me. Oh and the Italian
Sicilian is of it is is kind of heavy as well,
(23:11):
right right, You pointed me at a recipe for a
cocktail called a pimpanilla, which because I had to click
on that, right, and how could you not? Uh So,
this particular cocktail features one point five ounces of grappa,
an ounce of freshly squeezed lime juice, three quarters of
(23:32):
an ounce of Annas syrup, and one quarter of announce
of Saint germains. So there's also a lot of accoutremal
in the original recipe. There's some really fancy pants unicorn
Um salt for the rim that you can make that
is a lemon rosemary salt. I did not do that.
I went the simple route. I also didn't like garnish
(23:53):
it with an Annis pod, and I didn't even though
I have a beautiful rosemary bush right outside my front door.
Did I go out and get one to arnish it with? No?
I did not. I just wanted to get it in
the shaker and go to town. I expected to hate
this cocktail. I know you did. Like everything about this
cocktail is everything that I like, and I'm not the
way you're drank it, right. It's one of those things where, um,
(24:16):
I mean my my proclivities are usually towards something kind
of like soft and light. I don't like a particularly
fancy drink usually, like my go to is vodka and
diet coke. I'm a very basic person. Now. Granted, if
you don't like liquorice flavor because of the Annis, yes,
not going to be your jam, right. But it was
(24:37):
delightful And I love the Chair Liquorice Girl as well
well because the lime juice, the Annis and then the
Saint Germain is the magic trick like it it is
the thing that holds the whole thing together and like
takes all of the things, the characteristics of each of
the spirits or ingredients that you wouldn't enjoy, and it
(25:00):
just makes them kiss each other in a nice little way. Now,
is that that's elderflower, isn't it It is? That's another
one that's going to go into regular rotation at the fryhouse. Fantastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The pimpanella. If you just google that, you're going to
get this recipe and it's quite yummy. And then, uh,
I like that they call it a sprints. It's a sprints.
(25:22):
It's a sprints. It is. It's for you know, to
pretend that you're in Italy enjoying a beautiful, beautiful sunny day.
We hope that you like us. You're here to the end,
So thank you for listening to Criminalia, and if you
would like to subscribe to the show, we would also
just think that's grand. You can do that on the
I Heart Radio app, at Apple Podcasts, or wherever it
is you listen to shows. Criminalia is a production of
(25:46):
Shonda Land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. For
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Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Maria Trimarchi
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