The Price of Bread and the Witches of Triora

Triora sits on a mountain ridge in the Ligurian Alps, a labyrinth of narrow stone alleyways known locally as caruggi. In the late sixteenth century, the village was a vital and prosperous stronghold. Triora and its surrounding territory were regarded as an important grain-producing area of the Republic of Genoa.

By 1587, Triora had endured several years of poor harvests and a severe subsistence crisis. Drought appears in historical accounts, although historians have also pointed to the management and distribution of grain as part of the crisis. As frustration grew and a serious food shortage set in, suspicion turned toward witchcraft. The local community and podestà requested intervention from religious and civil authorities, helping transform a subsistence crisis into a criminal investigation.

The persecution cannot be reduced either to spontaneous village superstition or to a purely top-down conspiracy. Local fears became dangerous once they were formalized through ecclesiastical and civil judicial machinery. The first proceedings were led by the vicar of the bishop of Albenga, Girolamo dal Pozzo, together with the inquisitorial vicar. Their inquiries targeted women living in or associated with the poor district around the Cabotina, and accusations increasingly included demonic flight, nocturnal gatherings, infanticide, and harmful magic believed to bring storms or drought. Two women died during the early phase of the proceedings. Isotta Stella died after torture; another unnamed prisoner died after falling from a window, possibly during an attempted escape.

How a Local Accusation Became a State Investigation

The investigation widened sharply with the arrival of Giulio Scribani, the commissioner sent by the Republic of Genoa on June 8, 1588. Scribani expanded the investigation beyond the original circle of poor women, drawing in women from wealthier families and extending proceedings into neighboring communities. Modern historian Paolo Portone has argued that the later expansion of the trials intersected with local factional and economic interests, particularly once accusations reached affluent families.

Under Scribani's direction, interrogations became increasingly brutal and systematic. Women were subjected to the cavalletto, a form of rack-like torture apparatus, to force confessions. Among the accused was Franchetta Borelli, a woman from an affluent family who became one of the best-known figures in the Triora proceedings. The surviving interrogation record preserves one of her defiant responses to the torture: "I grind my teeth, but you will say that I laugh." Borelli survived the proceedings, unlike some of the early prisoners, and was eventually released.

As the proceedings expanded across Liguria and serious procedural and jurisdictional concerns emerged, the case drew scrutiny. The Republic of Genoa ordered the jurist Serafino Petrozzi to review Scribani's proceedings. The review did not produce an immediate clean break. Petrozzi challenged serious aspects of the investigation, particularly its evidentiary basis and jurisdiction, but proceedings and death sentences continued while civil and ecclesiastical authorities disputed authority. The conflict was not only about cruelty; it was also about jurisdiction. Witchcraft was treated as an ecclesiastical matter, while Scribani had exceeded a civil mandate. By late 1588, the Genoese Inquisition had asserted jurisdiction and the case files were sent to the Roman Holy Office. Rome's intervention shifted control away from the local proceedings and resulted in substantially more lenient final ecclesiastical dispositions between 1589 and 1590.

Today, spaces identified with the imprisonment and interrogation of the accused are preserved and interpreted by the local museum. The Cabotina remains one of the places most closely associated with the accusations, although the witches' gatherings attributed to it belong to the persecutors' narrative rather than demonstrable fact. What survives at Triora is not evidence that witches once gathered in the Cabotina. It is evidence that people believed they did—and that courts, officials, neighbors, and institutions were capable of turning that belief into arrests, torture, and death. The historical mystery is not whether the witches were real. It is how a community in crisis made them legally real.