When the council in Brentonico, an idyllic hamlet nestled in the foothills of the Italian alps, met two weeks ago, the usual debates over school autonomy and use of public land were temporarily shoved aside for a far more intriguing agenda item: whether a 60-year-old woman who was condemned to death as a witch nearly 300 years ago deserved to have another day in court.

Overwhelmingly, the council decided that she did.

Maria Bertoletti Toldini was not a particularly extraordinary woman, according to a local historian who has tried to piece together details of her life.

She was a childless widow who had remarried at the time of her arrest in August 1715. Months later, a trove of documents shows, she was found guilty of crimes including multiple murders of children, making land barren, damaging a local vineyard, blasphemy and heresy. She was even accused of throwing a five-year-old into a pot of boiling cheese.

Toldini was publicly beheaded and her body was burned where Brentonico’s green, manicured public park now lies.

For the man who has led the charge to clear Toldini’s name, a local culture minister named Quinto Canali, the effort – which he says will involve a real judge in a real court of appeals who will be familiar with the laws of the time – is an attempt to come to grips with a brutal period in European history and strip it of its folkloric romanticism.

Canali said he was inspired to act after watching a “terrible” theatrical re-enactment of Toldini’s story a few years ago, which he said was designed for tourists and deprived the victim of her humanity.

“Who would have the idea of doing a comedy folkloric show on Auschwitz?” he said. “If we see in our history that there was something that was wrong against humanity, we have to know it and say that this history was wrong.

“It is important now just as it was important 100 years ago and it will be important 100 years from now. There was a murder that was not justified, that should not have happened. They killed a person with motivations that didn’t exist. She was innocent.”

A historian, Carlo Andrea Postinger, who has studied documents from the period, said there were some unknowns in the Toldini case, like who first accused her of witchcraft. But he speculated that, like other women, she was probably targeted by members of her own family and close associates because of an argument, possibly over inheritance.

She was probably seen as vulnerable and different, largely because of her status as a childless widow. Unlike thousands of others who were killed for being witches during the inquisition, the Catholic church’s effort to root out heresy, Toldini was tried and condemned by a secular tribunal.

The Brentonico plateau in Trentino, Italy. Photograph: Alamy

She was one of the last women in the area near Brentonico (including the German-speaking region around Bolzano) to be accused of witchcraft and killed, Postinger said. At the time, Toldini was defended by a lawyer who argued that there could be natural causes for the crimes of which she was accused – a fact Postinger said was important because it showed how people’s thinking was beginning to evolve, including doubts about whether magic was real.

Most historians believe that 50,000-60,000 people – the vast majority of whom were women – were killed in Europe for witchcraft between the late 15th century and the early 18th century. The women were often subjected to torture and made to confess and accuse others of using sorcery.

But Toldini’s case stands out, Postinger said, because she did not accuse any other women of being accomplices.

Brentonico’s mayor, Christian Perenzoni, who is supportive of the retrial, said there had been objections – mostly about whether the issue was relevant and how much it might cost the town (he says the cost will be minimal) – but they had mostly been muted. Some have also asked whether too much attention was being paid to problems women faced 300 years ago, rather than today.

“I think there is a symbolic value in doing this, also in terms of women. This was a historic injustice against women – also in Greek tragedy we see they always face injustice, as well as today, in different forms,” the mayor said.

Canali himself acknowledged that the response to his initiative has been mixed, and he sees the reactions divided along gender, education and political lines, with women generally approving of the idea and less educated men and politically conservative newspapers thinking it was a waste of time. “I told them ‘f-you’, as we say in Italy,” he says with a chuckle.

One expert who has studied witchcraft in Italy, Louise Nyholm Kallestrup, an associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark, believes that retrying Toldini serves no purpose.

“Of course she was a victim, but there were numerous victims. What about all the homosexuals who were burned at the stake? You have numerous people who were harmed in crimes in the past that would never be considered a crime today,” she said. “I think that is just an example of not acknowleding the past and history on history’s terms.”

Asked whether it might make more sense to make sure that theatrical renditions of Toldini’s life were portrayed more accurately, or whether a monument in Brentonico’s park might be a better way to resurrect her reputation, Canali insisted that redress by a court of law is essential to right historical wrongs.

He points to the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the two Italian-born anarchists who were tried and convicted of murder and sentenced to death in the US (they were electrocuted in 1927), only to be vindicated decades later, when the then Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis proclaimed they had been unfairly treated and that the atmosphere of their trial and appeals were “permeated by prejudice against foreigners and hostility toward unorthodox political views”.

“It is one thing to be among intelligent cultured people and talk about this, but a real trial, a real judge, that is very powerful,” Canali said. “Sacco and Vanzetti were useful politically after that declaration.

“If you let something go that happened 300 years ago, maybe you will let something go that happens now. The past is yesterday, but it is also 300 years ago.”