[1] Spana was born in Sicily as the daughter of the wealthy Niccolo Spano, who was provisioning Spanish galleys and overseeing expenditures of Palermo's Ospedale degli Spagnol.
[1] After Gironima's father died, her stepmother remarried in 1624 to the well-off real estate investor Cesare Ranchetti (1564-1654).
[1] Her stepfather Cesare Ranchetti was described as a spendthrift who ruined the family's fortune; Spana had to marry in 1629 at the age of fourteen, and her stepmother became a professional marriage maker but also, unofficially, allegedly resumed her business as a poison distributor in Rome.
[1] Spana was married to Niccolo Caiozzi (d. 1657), a Florentine grain speculator, who was described as an adulterous spendthrift, but he is not listed as living with her after 1640 and he is known to have left Rome in 1655 to escape his creditors.
[1] Spana was an astrologer of note in Rome, where she was engaged to predict the future and find missing objects by clients in the Roman aristocracy.
[1] On 2 February, Spana was arrested and taken to the Papal prison of Tor di Nona, where she was interrogated by the lieuntenant governor Stefano Bracchi.
[1] The investigation, the Spana Prosecution, continued for several months until March 1660, involving about forty people accused of having sold or used the poison, with Spana and four of her female business associates, Giovanna De Grandis, Maria Spinola, Graziosa Farina, and Laura Crispoldi, executed at the Campo de' Fiori in Rome on 5 July 1659.