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interrogations and confrontations with her former associates and clients. She was willing to answer questions and talked a lot, but only provided harmless information, such as long, detailed answers of acquaintances, their family history and residence, but never anything which could be seen as incriminating. She was described as much more resilient than her fellow prisoners; in contrast to them, she did not even talk about her guilt in her confession to a priest. Her lack of confession was a problem since law did not permit execution without it. She did not confess until 20 June. She finally signed a long statement of guilt. In regard to the poison, she stated: "I've given this liquid to more people than I’ve got hairs on my head".
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is known to have been established on the Via della
Lungara in Rome in 1643. Spana was married to Niccolo Caiozzi (d. 1657), a Florentine grain speculator, who was described as an adulterous spendthrift, but he is not listed as living with her after 1640 and he is known to have left Rome in 1655 to escape his creditors.
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Spana officially established herself as a professional astrologer and a distributor of herbal medicine. However, she was also instructed by her stepmother in how to manufacture and sell the Aqua Tofana poison. Together, the two women trafficked deadly poison and specialized in selling poison to women
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Her stepfather Cesare
Ranchetti was described as a spendthrift who ruined the family's fortune; Spana had to marry in 1629 at the age of fourteen, and her stepmother became a professional marriage maker but also, unofficially, allegedly resumed her business as a poison distributor in Rome. The family
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Spana was an astrologer of note in Rome, where she was engaged to predict the future and find missing objects by clients in the Roman aristocracy. It is noted that she behaved and dressed in a manner which made her acceptable in the salons of the aristocracy, and it is mentioned how her rich client
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On 2 February, Spana was arrested and taken to the Papal prison of Tor di Nona, where she was interrogated by the lieuntenant governor
Stefano Bracchi. Spana was described as intelligent, self assured and confident. She denied all accusations and stood by her denial for months, despite repeated
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Historians point to her stepmother dying in her sleep in 1651 with no one aware of her poisoning activities. After her death 17 January 1651, Spana took over her business. She developed it into a considerable enterprise, with several poison saleswomen active in the business in the 1650s.
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married to abusive husbands. Giulia
Mangiardi was later described by contemporaries who met her in Rome as "a nasty, ugly woman" and "unpleasant and raggedy", but Gironima had a very good relationship with her stepmother, whom she described as "una brava donna" ('a good woman').
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as the daughter of the wealthy
Niccolo Spano, who was provisioning Spanish galleys and overseeing expenditures of Palermo's Ospedale degli Spagnol. She became the stepdaughter of Giulia Mangiardi (1581-1651), traditionally known in history as
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to clients who wished to commit murder, in particular women who wished to become widows. She was executed alongside four women accomplices for having distributed poison to clients with the intent of murder. She has also been called
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Gironima Spana and the Spana
Prosecution became the subject of sensationalist myths, and she has been confused with her stepmother Giulia Tofana.
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After
Gironima's father died, her stepmother remarried in 1624 to the well-off real estate investor Cesare Ranchetti (1564-1654).
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sent for her in their carriages and that she often travelled around Rome in carriages borrowed from her aristocratic friends.
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In 1624, the family fled to her maternal uncle in Rome, the cleric and astrologer Andrea
Lorestino (d. 1627).
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The poison business was exposed to the Papal authorities with the arrest of one of Spana's poison sellers,
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117:(1615 – 5 July 1659) was an Italian poisoner and astrologer. She was the central figure in the infamous
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Philip Wexler, Toxicology in the Middle Ages and
Renaissance, Elsevier Science - 2017, pages 63-64
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The Black Widows of the
Eternal City: The True Story of Rome’s Most Infamous poisoners
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against a net of poison merchant women in Rome who distributed the poison
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Gironima Spana and the Spana Prosecution are the fictionalized focus of
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