Leonarda Cianciulli was convicted in July 1946 of killing three women in Correggio, a farming town of about 19,000 people in the province of Reggio Emilia, in northern Italy. The women disappeared one after another between December 1939 and November 1940. All three knew her, all three lived alone, and each had been persuaded to sell what she owned and tell people she was leaving to start a new life somewhere else. Postcards in their names reassured friends that all was well.
Cianciulli told investigators, and later the court, that she had killed the women as sacrifices to protect her eldest son, who faced military service in the Second World War. Prosecutors argued that she killed for the women's money and goods. The Corte d'Assise of Reggio Emilia found her guilty of three murders, theft and desecration of corpses, accepted that she was partly of unsound mind, and sentenced her to 30 years in prison with three more in a criminal asylum. Her son, tried as her accomplice, was acquitted. She spent the rest of her life in judicial asylums and died at Pozzuoli, near Naples, in October 1970.
The Italian press named her "la saponificatrice di Correggio," the soap-maker of Correggio, after what she said she had done with the bodies. The historian Barbara Bracco, who studied the police, psychiatric and trial records for a 2018 book, has argued that much of what is repeated about the case online is inaccurate.
Cianciulli was born in Montella, a hill town in Irpinia, in the province of Avellino in Campania. Sky TG24 and the science site Geopop give her birth year as 1894; the exact date is not settled in the reports. Il Fatto Quotidiano gives her full name as Leonarda Vincenza Giuseppa Cianciulli. At home she was called "Nardina," the name her mother used, and "Norina," a name from her father, according to the Bologna sociologist Roberta Bisi, who studied her memoir. Bisi read the two names as two sides of one personality: Nardina the suffering mother, Norina the one who acted.
Much of what is known about her early years comes from her own memoir, written decades later in a judicial asylum, and it cannot be checked. In it she wrote that she believed her mother hated her, and that she tried to kill herself as a child. A police description of 1941, cited in a review of Bracco's book, recorded her as 46 years old and about 1.50 meters tall, with an elementary education and a reputation for being excitable. The photographic archive of Federico Patellani, who covered her trial, notes a childhood of poverty and a history of epilepsy, and Sky TG24 also reports that she had epilepsy.
Her family wanted her to marry a cousin. Instead, in 1917 by the accounts of Sky TG24 and Geopop, she married a clerk at the land registry office who came from the Potenza area of Basilicata. In her memoir she wrote that her mother cursed the marriage, and she blamed that curse for the death of her first daughter in the influenza epidemic of 1918.
The losses that followed shaped everything she later said about herself. She reported 17 pregnancies, of which only four children survived, according to Il Fatto Quotidiano, Sky TG24 and Focus. Il Resto del Carlino, drawing on her memoir, has written that three pregnancies ended early and ten babies died in the cradle. She also recounted being told by fortune tellers that she would have children and watch them all die; Focus reports that she blamed this on a curse, either from a Romani woman or from her own mother.
She had a criminal record before she reached the north. Il Fatto Quotidiano reports two convictions in Montella, for fraud and for armed robbery, served in prisons in the Potenza area. Geopop describes convictions for assault and fraud and a ten-month prison term, and Francesca Mogavero's 2024 book on the case counts three earlier convictions, for theft, fraud and threatening someone with a dagger. The sources agree that she had served time; they differ on the offenses.
On July 23, 1930, an earthquake of magnitude 6.7 struck Irpinia and the area around Monte Vulture, killing about 1,400 people, according to Italy's civil protection department. Cianciulli's home was destroyed, and that year she moved north with her husband and four children and settled in Correggio. Il Fatto Quotidiano adds that the family also wanted to escape gossip in Montella.
In Correggio her husband found poorly paid work, and Cianciulli built her own trade. She sold secondhand clothes and read palms, told fortunes and offered to lift the evil eye, according to Focus. Her husband later left the household, and she made her own reputation and standing in the town. Roberta Bisi described her as a natural leader, a charming woman who wanted complete control over the people around her and enjoyed the deference they showed her. Il Fatto Quotidiano describes her as eccentric, a committed Fascist, and well liked; by its account she was fully part of the life of the town.
Her eldest son was her favorite. By the end of the 1930s he was about 20. As Italy moved toward war, her two eldest sons were declared fit for military service, and Augusto Balloni, the Bologna neuropsychiatrist and criminologist who led a 2010 study of the case, dated the start of her delusions to that moment. The fear of losing them at the front, he said, set off a breakdown.
Cianciulli's own account, given to investigators and in her memoir, was that her children could be saved only by the sacrifice of other lives. Focus reports that she said a black Madonna had appeared to her in a dream and asked for innocent lives in exchange for her children's. Il Fatto Quotidiano reports a version in which her dead mother demanded the sacrifices. Raffaella Sette, a Bologna criminologist and handwriting analyst who studied her letters, argued that a woman raised among fortune tellers had come to believe in such an exchange, and that superstition had warped her sense of right and wrong.
Prosecutors did not accept any of this. The court record, Il Resto del Carlino reported in 2024, points to robbery as the motive.
Ermelinda Faustina Setti was 73, the oldest of the three women. Geopop describes her as a widow who could barely read and write and who hoped to find a new companion. Cianciulli told her she had found her a husband, a wealthy widower in Pola, on the Istrian coast. Setti sold her belongings and handed over her savings, expecting to move north to join him, according to Il Fatto Quotidiano. Focus reports that each of the women was persuaded to sign a power of attorney that let Cianciulli sell her property.
Setti disappeared shortly before Christmas 1939. Mogavero's book dates the first disappearance to December 18, 1939. Cianciulli later confessed that she had killed her in her home.
Francesca Clementina Soavi was 55. She had been a kindergarten teacher and sold cloth, according to Il Fatto Quotidiano. Cianciulli promised her a teaching post at a school away from Correggio: in Piacenza, by Il Fatto Quotidiano's account, or at a college in Padua, by Geopop's. Cianciulli offered to sell Soavi's possessions for her.
Soavi disappeared on September 5, 1940, according to Geopop. Afterward, postcards in her name told people that she was fine. Il Fatto Quotidiano reports that Cianciulli's son sent them; he was later tried and acquitted.
Virginia Cacioppo was 59. She had been an opera soprano, and by 1940 she had lost her husband, her son and her voice, Il Fatto Quotidiano writes. Cianciulli told her she had found her work as a secretary in Florence, where a wealthy widower was said to be waiting. Cacioppo was told to sell everything and to tell no one. She told a friend anyway.
She disappeared on November 30, 1940, the date given by Geopop and by Mogavero's book. She was the last of the three.
Little is known about the three women beyond these outlines. Bracco's research, as described in a review in the magazine Doppiozero, found that none of them had close living relatives, and that before they vanished each had sold her property and told people she was moving away. Mogavero describes them as women who were alone, with few ties, some savings put aside, and more than one regret. That loneliness made them easy to deceive, and it also explains why, for months, no one asked where they had gone.
The case began with the last victim's family. Virginia Cacioppo's sister-in-law did not believe the story that Cacioppo had left for a new life. She went to the authorities and pressed them to look into Cianciulli's connections with the missing women, according to Il Fatto Quotidiano, Geopop and Infobae. Geopop reports that when the police at first showed little interest, she made her own inquiries. Focus says that a relative of the last victim refused to accept the postcard she had received and demanded an investigation.
Other voices joined hers. Il Fatto Quotidiano reports that dozens of anonymous letters began to arrive pointing toward Cianciulli. The Reggio Emilia police took up the case and, within a few months, gathered strong evidence by following the missing women's belongings, the Doppiozero review of Bracco's book reports.
The trail ran through money. Virginia Cacioppo had owned state bonds, and police found that one of them had been cashed. Il Fatto Quotidiano reports that the bonds had been sold by the parish priest of a Correggio church, who said he had received them from a local cheesemaker; the cheesemaker said he had received them from Cianciulli, together with money and jewelry. Bracco's study describes a small criminal circle around the bonds: Cianciulli, the priest, and a cheesemaker who was in financial difficulty.
Cianciulli was detained and taken to police headquarters. Sky TG24 dates her arrest to 1941. At first she denied everything, Geopop reports.
She was questioned 19 times, according to Bracco's study and Mogavero's book. She confessed when investigators turned their attention to her eldest son. Il Fatto Quotidiano writes that when he too was detained as a suspect, she broke down; Geopop and the Doppiozero review both say she confessed to clear him. From then on she named herself as the only person responsible.
In her confession she said she had killed each woman and then disposed of the bodies. Two domestic workers from the household gave statements that supported parts of her account, the Doppiozero review reports. Mogavero notes that the bodies were never found, and that much of the story told about the case rests on conjecture, rumor and Cianciulli's own words.
Her later explanations changed. Il Resto del Carlino reported in 2024 that she moved over the years from the account of ritual sacrifice to a claim of a political plot. Geopop writes that her explanations grew more elaborate over time and that investigators found no support for them, and suggests she was building toward a defense of mental infirmity.
Cianciulli and her son both waited years for trial. Letters written between May 19 and October 9, 1941, preserved in the State Archive of Bologna with the trial papers, show both of them held while awaiting trial, in the prisons of Reggio Emilia and Bologna. They include letters between Cianciulli and her lawyer and the director of the Bologna prison, letters between mother and son, and letters between the son and his father. Raffaella Sette used them for a handwriting study of the family, published in 2010.
The war delayed the trial until 1946, Focus reports. In 1944 a raid on the Bologna prison freed about 400 inmates, among them Cianciulli's son. According to the Doppiozero review, he chose to give himself up rather than go into hiding.
Before the trial, the court had her examined by Filippo Saporito, a professor at the University of Rome and director of the criminal asylum at Aversa. Focus reports that Saporito diagnosed a hysterical psychosis and found her wholly of unsound mind. He described her attachment to her children as "elefantiasi materna," which can be translated as a swelling or overgrowth of motherhood, and he believed it had driven her to human sacrifice. At his request she wrote a long account of her life, the memoir later known as "Confessioni di un'anima amareggiata" ("Confessions of an Embittered Soul").
Not everyone agreed with him. Focus reports that the investigating section of the Bologna Court of Appeal accused Saporito of having been bewitched by her and held her fully responsible. Bracco, according to the Doppiozero review, treats the diagnosis mainly as a product of the positivist psychiatry of the period, in the tradition of Cesare Lombroso, which saw hysteria as the typical female disorder.
The trial before the Corte d'Assise of Reggio Emilia opened in 1946, in a country still recovering from the war, and it drew a crowd. The photographer Federico Patellani covered it; his archive, now held by the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Cinisello Balsamo near Milan, includes pictures taken in the courtroom on June 20, 1946, showing the judge, a witness giving evidence, and Cianciulli seated behind bars.
Bracco has described the trial as a record of Italy's passage from Fascism to the Republic. The Doppiozero review summarizes her account. A reporter for l'Unità named Giordani described the proceedings as chaotic and wrote of personal political influence that had freed or acquitted people who were deeply involved. Two of the lawyers for the civil parties turned out to have been a collaborator and a member of the Salò Republic. The defense lawyer had gone into hiding during the war and had been sentenced to death in absentia by the Fascists.
The courtroom was packed and noisy. One witness was reported to have given a Roman salute as he left the stand, which drew laughter from jurors, lawyers and carabinieri alike. A newspaper joked that the two sides "si cianciullano," turning her name into a verb, as they argued over her mental state.
Cianciulli herself, a committed Fascist, gave the court a new explanation for what she had done, drawing on the news of the death camps and the Nuremberg trials. A reporter from Reggio remarked that she "should have been born in Germany" (translated). She told the court that she could show how quickly the work could be done, and asked to give a demonstration. Focus reports that the request was never granted, and that the popular story that a judge gave her a corpse to work on is a myth, according to Balloni. Some experts at the trial doubted that a woman of her size could have done alone what she claimed. Balloni has said that the detail in her memoir leaves little room for that doubt.
On July 20, 1946, the court found Cianciulli guilty of the three murders, of theft and of desecration of corpses, Il Fatto Quotidiano reports. The court rejected Saporito's finding of total insanity and found her "seminferma di mente," partly of unsound mind, according to Focus. She was sentenced to 30 years in prison and three years in a criminal asylum, the figures given by Sky TG24 and Infobae; Il Fatto Quotidiano gives the sentence as 33 years, the first three to be served in the asylum, and Focus describes 30 years preceded by three years in a place of care.
Her son was acquitted the same day. Focus reports that he was cleared for lack of evidence. When she heard the verdict on him, Cianciulli said, "Dio sia benedetto, viva la legge": "God be blessed, long live the law" (translated). She also told the court, "Non ho ucciso per odio ma solo per amore di madre": "I did not kill out of hatred but only out of a mother's love" (translated).
She was the only person convicted. Bracco, as the Doppiozero review puts it, keeps asking the question no one at the time seemed to ask: what about everyone else? The husband, the three sons who were never charged, and the neighbors and relatives seem to have escaped scrutiny.
In practice the sentence kept her in judicial asylums for the rest of her life. She was held first at the judicial asylum of Aversa, in Campania, where she wrote her memoir, and later at the women's judicial asylum in Pozzuoli, near Naples. Bracco's study records several suicide attempts in custody, and the traces of her life grow fainter in the later years, the Doppiozero review notes.
Il Fatto Quotidiano reports that at Pozzuoli she stayed kind to everyone and went on baking sweets.
She died of a stroke at about 2 a.m. on October 15, 1970, after nearly two days in a coma, at the women's judicial asylum in Pozzuoli, where she was still serving the sentence of the Reggio Emilia assize court. Her age at death is given as 76 by Il Resto del Carlino and 77 by Il Fatto Quotidiano and Geopop.
The memoir she wrote at Saporito's request ran to more than 700 handwritten pages, according to Mogavero, and about 800, according to Focus. In it she denied killing out of hatred or greed. "Non ho ucciso per odio o per avidità, ma solo per amore di madre," she wrote: "I did not kill out of hatred or greed, but only out of a mother's love" (translated).
Historians and criminologists have used it with care. Bracco, the Doppiozero review says, treats both the memoir and Cianciulli's statements cautiously, since details may have been embellished, shaped by the way the psychiatrist saw her, or meant to protect her son. Bracco does not dwell on the sensational stories that later made the case famous.
In May 2024 two photographs of Cianciulli that had never been published appeared in La Nuova Ferrara, and were reported by Il Resto del Carlino and Il Fatto Quotidiano. They were taken on July 8, 1970, about three months before she died, for her file at Pozzuoli. Fausto Bassini, a publisher in Ferrara, found them after about 15 years of research among roughly 1,000 pages of prison and clinical records.
Bassini said she looked serene in the pictures, with a faint smile. By then, he said, her mental illness was real, unlike at her trial in 1946, when in his view she had skillfully feigned madness. Il Resto del Carlino reported that the file adds nothing of significance to what was known about the crimes.
In 2010 a team at the University of Bologna led by Augusto Balloni, with Roberta Bisi and Cecilia Monti, published a book of new research on the case, "Soda caustica, allume di rocca e pece greca. Il caso Cianciulli." Its sources included her memoir, the sentence, transcripts of her interrogations and her letters. Monti, who examined the forensic evidence, questioned parts of Cianciulli's account, including how what she described could have gone unnoticed in the house.
One chapter, by Sandra Sicurella and Elena Bianchini, collected the memories of well-placed local people 70 years after the killings. It studied how a small rural community, where everyone knew everyone, had coped with sudden national fame through crime reporting. Il Resto del Carlino has called the case the first great Italian media case.
The case has been retold many times. Barbara Bracco's history, "La saponificatrice di Correggio. Una favola nera," was published by Il Mulino in 2018. Francesca Mogavero's "La Saponificatrice di Correggio. Il caso Cianciulli," edited by Gianni Biondillo, was published by Giunti in 2024; it reads the story through Vladimir Propp's study of folk tales and opens with a scene the author says probably never happened.
Mauro Bolognini's 1977 film "Gran Bollito," starring Shelley Winters, was loosely based on the case. In February 2025 Sky TG24 reported that an international production had bought the rights to that film and to Cianciulli's asylum memoir for a new film, "The Soap Maker," to be directed by the French filmmaker Claire Denis and shot in Italy; it was presented at the European Film Market in Berlin, with no start date announced.
Carlo Lucarelli's series "Profondo Nero" devoted an episode to her in 2015 on the Crime+Investigation channel. The rapper J-Ax's Spotify podcast "Non aprite quella podcast" covered the case in 2022, and the local station Etv featured it in its series "Storie d'Autore" in November 2024. The Criminological Museum in Rome displays objects connected with the case, according to Geopop and Infobae.
Motive. Cianciulli always said she killed to save her son. Prosecutors argued greed, and the court record points to robbery, according to Il Resto del Carlino. Geopop notes that some books and articles still repeat her sacrifice story despite the evidence of a financial motive. The court's finding of partial insanity did not settle the question.
Her son's role. Prosecutors believed she had an accomplice, presumably her eldest son. Il Fatto Quotidiano reports that he sent postcards in Soavi's name. He was acquitted in 1946, cleared for lack of evidence according to Focus.
What she said she did with the bodies. The story that made the case famous rests mainly on her confession and memoir. The bodies were never found. Bracco's study notes that two maids supported part of her account. Balloni found the memoir convincing; Monti raised practical doubts. The further claims about what became of the remains, repeated in many retellings, are her own statements and have not been reported as confirmed by independent evidence; Bracco's study does not dwell on them.
The demonstration. A popular story says the court let her prove her skill on a corpse. Focus, citing Balloni, says this is a myth and that the request was never granted. Captions in the Patellani archive repeat a version of the story.
Dates. Focus says she was arrested in November 1940, a few months after the last murder; Sky TG24 says 1941; the Doppiozero review dates her confession to the summer of 1940, which does not fit the November 1940 disappearance. Letters show her held awaiting trial by May 1941.
Her early life. The details of her childhood, her mother's curse and the prophecies come from her own memoir and cannot be checked. The sources differ on her earlier convictions and on the number of her pregnancies and children.
1894: born in Montella, Irpinia (year per Sky TG24 and Geopop).
1917: marries a land registry clerk against her family's wishes.
1918: her first daughter dies in the influenza epidemic, by her memoir.
July 23, 1930: earthquake in Irpinia and the Vulture area; her home is destroyed and the family moves to Correggio that year.
Late 1930s: her two eldest sons are declared fit for military service.
December 1939 (December 18 per Mogavero): Faustina Setti, 73, disappears.
September 5, 1940: Francesca Clementina Soavi, 55, disappears.
November 30, 1940: Virginia Cacioppo, 59, disappears.
1940 to 1941: Cacioppo's sister-in-law presses the police; anonymous letters; police trace Cacioppo's bonds.
1941: Cianciulli arrested (Sky TG24); questioned 19 times; confesses after her son is detained.
May 19 to October 9, 1941: letters show mother and son held in Reggio Emilia and Bologna prisons awaiting trial.
1944: a raid on the Bologna prison frees her son; he gives himself up.
June 20, 1946: Federico Patellani photographs the trial in Reggio Emilia.
July 20, 1946: convicted by the Corte d'Assise of Reggio Emilia of three murders, theft and desecration of corpses; found partly of unsound mind; 30 years plus three in a criminal asylum; her son acquitted.
After 1946: held at the judicial asylum of Aversa, where she writes her memoir, then at Pozzuoli.
July 8, 1970: last photographs taken for her Pozzuoli file.
October 15, 1970: dies of a stroke at the women's judicial asylum in Pozzuoli.
1977: Mauro Bolognini's film "Gran Bollito."
2010: University of Bologna study "Soda caustica, allume di rocca e pece greca. Il caso Cianciulli."
2018: Barbara Bracco's history published by Il Mulino.
May 2024: the 1970 photographs published.
September 2024: Francesca Mogavero's book published by Giunti.
February 2025: a new film, "The Soap Maker," announced at the European Film Market in Berlin.