Leonarda Cianciulli was born at Montella in southern Italy in 1893, the child of a rape, and was told so by a mother who never forgave her for existing. She twice tried to kill herself as a girl. She eloped with Raffaele Pansardi against her mother's wishes, and her mother cursed the marriage and the children of it.
She had seventeen pregnancies. Three ended in miscarriage and ten of the children died young. She kept four. She went to fortune tellers for years looking for a way out of it, and was told by one that she would end her days in prison and an asylum and by another that she would watch every one of her children die. She set up as a soothsayer herself in Correggio, in Emilia-Romagna, and was well liked and much visited. The Italian press called her the Soap-Maker of Correggio.
When Italy entered the war and her eldest and favourite son Giuseppe was called up, she decided that a life would have to be given for his. Faustina Setti, an unmarried woman of her acquaintance, was persuaded that a husband had been found for her in Pola and told to write letters to her friends saying she had arrived safely and was well. She was given drugged wine and killed with an axe. Francesca Soavi was promised a job at a school in Piacenza and killed the same way in September 1940. Virginia Cacioppo, a former soprano, was promised work with a theatrical impresario and killed later that month.
What she did afterwards is why the case is remembered. She dismembered the bodies, dissolved the remains in caustic soda in a copper pot, and turned them into cakes of soap which she gave to neighbours, and into a sweet tea cake which she served to visitors and ate herself. Of Cacioppo, whose flesh she found the finest, she wrote that the cakes were unusually good.
Cacioppo's sister-in-law did not believe the story about Florence and went to the police. Cianciulli confessed at length and in detail, and at her trial in Reggio Emilia in 1946 was convicted and sentenced to thirty years' imprisonment and three in a criminal asylum. She wrote a memoir in prison, An Embittered Soul's Confessions, which is where much of the account comes from. She died of cerebral apoplexy at the women's criminal asylum at Pozzuoli on October 15, 1970. The pot and the caustic soda ladle are in the Criminological Museum in Rome.