22. The Final Deadly Toll?
The number of Tofana’s victims might have been exaggerated – she was tortured, and people can say anything under torture to make it stop. Indeed, considering that much of the evidence against her consisted of confessions extracted under torture, Tofana could have been innocent. She might well have simply been a woman dabbling in cosmetics, at a time when a literal witch-hunt mania was sweeping Europe, and women doing anything unusual were suspect.
The legacy of Giulia Tofana survived long after her death. In 1791, when the composer Amadeus Mozart fell seriously ill, he became convinced that he had been poisoned. As he put it: “I will not last much longer; I am sure that I have been poisoned. I cannot rid myself of this idea … Someone has given me Aqua Tofana and calculated the precise time of my death“. Mozart was almost certainly mistaken, and historians believe he died of rheumatic fever, syphilis, or from having eaten undercooked pork. His paranoia – shared by many who took ill in those days of poor medical diagnosis – was testimony to the continuing terror inspired by Tofana and her deadly concoction.
