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.

The Smithsonian Institution in Washington preserves an articulated Franciscan friar, attributed to Juanelo Turriano and dated around 1560, that walks in a square path, strikes its chest with its right arm, raises a cross and a rosary with its left and moves its head as if praying, driven by a wound spring. The Toledan legend of the Hombre de Palo —⁠a figure that supposedly roamed the streets begging alms for its creator and was destroyed by the Inquisition⁠— is the most widely spread story about Turriano, but its real existence has not been documented with certainty and there is no direct connection to the Madrid street.