Giovanna Bonanno was an elderly woman of the Zisa quarter of Palermo who, in the late 1780s, supplied a preparation to other people who used it to end the lives of husbands and other relatives. She was arrested in 1788, tried before a Palermo court on charges of poisoning and sorcery, and executed on July 30, 1789. She did not give the preparation to the dead men herself; the court proceedings implicated six women and one man who did. The number of deaths she was held to account for is not on record, but the surviving papers describe several separate deaths in separate households.
A court dossier of more than fifteen hundred pages was filed, and a historian at the University of Palermo, Giovanna Fiume, has published a study of it. Much of what is repeated about Bonanno today comes from later retelling and local tradition.
She is remembered as Giovanna Bonanno. Her birth name was probably Anna Pantò, and she took the surname Bonanno by marriage; it has also been suggested that her name was altered by an error in copying the trial papers. Her year of birth is not on record. At the time of her arrest she was about seventy-five years old, or by another estimate eighty.
She lived in the Zisa, the sixth quarter of the city, in poverty. She could read, which was unusual among poor women of the period, and she made her living by passing herself off as a healer who sold remedies and charms. That reputation brought her into contact with unhappily married women, who became her customers.
Men died in the Zisa one after another, in separate households, over a period before 1788. Several of the dead are named in the trial papers, among them three men who died after the preparation was used on them. The years of the deaths are not on record, and a total is not on record either.
Bonanno's part was to supply. Others carried out the acts. Six women and one man were implicated: the women were wives, and the one man had used it against his wife. In the historian Giovanna Fiume's reading of the dossier, the wives saw ending a difficult marriage in this way as a practical and socially understood choice. A Palermo apothecary was also drawn into the proceedings and was later acquitted.
Bonanno was arrested in 1788. She gave a deposition on October 9, 1788, in proceedings brought before the Gran Corte Criminale against her and her accomplices, which set out the allegation that she sold a preparation to other women "ad homines occidendum", in order to kill people. The dossier survives in the State Archive of Palermo.
The trial opened in 1788 before the Capitaniale Court of the City of Palermo, the Regia Corte Capitaniale, and the first-instance conviction was confirmed by the Gran Corte. Witnesses at the trial included surviving spouses and a supplier. She was held in the Steri, the palace in Palermo that had served as a prison.
Read as a whole, the dossier shows a court that took cases that ordinary people understood in terms of sorcery and handled them as cases of veneficio. The two charges were "veneficio" (poisoning) and "stregoneria" (sorcery). The sentence is dated April 13, 1789.
Bonanno was convicted of poisoning and sorcery. The wording of the verdict is not on record, so which individual deaths the court found proved against her, and how it described her part, is not on record either. The description that survives from the time is that of the Marquis of Villabianca, a Palermo nobleman who kept a diary of the city. His entry for the day of the execution notes that Giovanna Bonanno was put to death as the maker and distributor of the preparation.
The women who used it were also brought before the court. Their verdicts are not on record.
She was executed on July 30, 1789 in Palermo, in the square then called Piazza Vigliena, known today as the Quattro Canti. The square was earlier called Piazza degli Ottangoli.
A bust of Bonanno is kept at the Museo Etnografico Siciliano Giuseppe Pitre in Palermo. The ethnologist and physician Salvatore Salomone Marino studied the trial papers, and the novelist Luigi Natoli published a novel on her story in 1927.
Local legend, which has no support in the court papers, holds that her spirit still walks the streets of the Zisa.
Several things are not settled. The number of deaths is not on record. Her birth name, Anna Pantò, is probable rather than certain. Her age at arrest is given as about seventy-five and as eighty. The court is named in different forms: the Capitaniale Court of the City of Palermo, the Regia Corte Capitaniale and the Gran Corte Criminale. The sentence date of April 13, 1789 is not confirmed.
Before 1788: men die in separate households in the Zisa quarter of Palermo after others use a preparation she supplied.
1788: Giovanna Bonanno is arrested; the trial opens before the Capitaniale court of Palermo.
October 9, 1788: a deposition is taken in the proceedings, filed in the State Archive of Palermo.
April 13, 1789: the sentence.
1789: the conviction is confirmed by the Gran Corte.
July 30, 1789: she is executed in Piazza Vigliena, the Quattro Canti, Palermo.
1927: Luigi Natoli publishes a novel on her story.