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Updated: June 5, 2025
In this region Alpine detachments of the Italian army on the night of July 8, 1916, gained possession of a great part of the valley between Tofana Peaks Nos. 7 and 2, and of a strong position on Tofana Prima commanding the valley. The Austrian garrison was surrounded and compelled to surrender.
"Now, madame," said he, "he was killed by treason it is by treason that he must be revenged. Ah! you do not know one thing the hand of God is with us, for to-night I have found the secret of the 'Aqua tofana, that poison of the Medicis and of Rene the Florentine." "Really?" "Come and see, madame." "But where is Grandchamp?"
It was hinted that his last hours were darkened by hallucinations, and the pious pictured him as haunted by profligate visions, while the free-thinkers maintained that he was the dupe of priestly jugglery. Toward the end there was the inevitable rumour of acqua tofana, and the populace cried out that the Jesuits were at work again.
This Italian gusto for the smell of blood, appears to have been introduced into the palaces of France from those of Italy by alliance with the Medici those ennobled pawnbrokers of the middle ages, whose parvenu taste engendered the fantastic gilding of the renaissance, which they naturalized in the Tuileries and at Fontainbleau, in common with the stiletto and acqua tofana of their poisoners, and the fatalism of their judicial astrology.
In it was a number of small flaskets, each filled with pills like grains of mustard-seed, the essence and quintessence of various poisons, that put on the appearance of natural diseases, and which, mixed in due proportion with the aqua tofana, covered the foulest murders with the lawful ensigns of the angel of death.
So much by way of preamble; the story proper I will read from my notes. "'De Quincey was right, and murder should be a fine art. But the Borgias only amateurs! The far-famed Aqua Tofana pooh! Any chemist will put it up for ten cents. Only be careful how you use it. Chemical analysis has advanced somewhat since the day of the divine Lucrezia, and a jury would convict without leaving their seats.
It was the first time she had ever dared to administer that subtle poison in the fashion of La Borgia. "The aqua tofana does its work like a charm!" muttered she. "That vial was compounded by Beatrice Spara, and is worthy of her skill and more sure than her stiletto! I was frantic to use that weapon, for no purpose than to redden my hands with the work of a low bravo!"
We talk with wondering execration of the great poisoners of past ages, the Borgias, the inventor of aqua tofana, and the amiable Marchioness de Brinvilliers; but Pinto was of opinion that there were more social poisoners about in the present day than in the darkest, and the most demoralized periods, and then none of them are punished; which is so strange, he would add, as they are all found out.
A counterattack recaptured for the Italians the greater part of the ground lost. On September 8, 1916, in the Tofana zone Italian troops repulsed an attack against the position in the Travenanzes Valley which their troops had taken on September 7, 1916. On the Trentino front the activity of the artillery was more pronounced on September 9, 1916.
I went up by automobile as far as the clambering new road goes up the flanks of Tofana No. 2; thence for a time by mule along the flank of Tofana No. 1, and thence on foot to the vestiges of the famous Castelletto.
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