Calle de Juanelo

The street recalls Gianello Torriani, the Cremonese engineer and clockmaker known in Spain as Juanelo Turriano. Charles I brought him over around 1529 for his court clockworks, and Philip II summoned him to Madrid as Chief Mathematician. His great work was in Toledo: the Contraption that raised water from the Tagus nearly a hundred metres up to the Alcázar. Even while living there, he owned land in Lavapiés, right where his name would arise. The street runs through Embajadores, between calle de Jesús y María and plaza de Cascorro. Its layout and name have barely shifted since the 17th century: Texeira’s map already labelled it so in 1656. Weighty neighbours passed through its doorways. The Baroque painter Sebastián Muñoz died here in 1690 falling from scaffolding. At number 18 lived Jovellanos between 1782 and 1798, with a plaque on the façade since 1982. And at number 3, in December 1914, Hildegart Rodríguez, the socialist child prodigy, was born.