Giardino Jacquard, English garden and museum in Schio, Italy.
Giardino Jacquard is a late-Romantic English garden of about 5,000 square metres in Schio, sloping up toward the church of San Rocco. Its flat section has winding paths, an exedra-shaped greenhouse with a pagoda-roofed turret, and monuments to Francesco and Alessandro Rossi. Beyond lie a nymphaeum topped by a bust of Atlas and entrances to artificial grottoes.
The garden was commissioned by industrialist Alessandro Rossi and built between 1859 and 1878 by architect Antonio Caregaro Negrin. It occupies land used in the 18th century by mills founded by Nicolò Tron, later owned by the Rubini and then the Rossi family. Before the garden, the area served production: a weaving shed on the left, the wool warehouse on the right, cloth-drying racks and workers' urinals whose ammonia fed the wool cycle.
The garden is named after Joseph-Marie Jacquard, the French inventor of the automatic loom, and was opened to the workers of the Rossi woollen mill. The theatre's facade carries twelve terracotta medallions made in 1868 by Gian Battista Boni, showing busts of notable people of Schio such as Nicolò Tron and Giovanni da Schio. The ground floor of the same building held an evening school, a café and a library for the workers.
The garden belongs to the municipality of Schio and is only partially and occasionally open to visitors. Restoration work begun in 2015, funded by the municipality, the Veneto Region, the Cariverona Foundation and the FAI, led to a reopening on 13 April 2019. A stone and cobble staircase outside the walls on the right side leads up to the church of San Rocco.
Before the garden existed, the site was used for wool production: drying racks for woollen cloth stood here, and workers' urinals were exploited to produce ammonia for the manufacturing cycle. The 1878 "tettoia degli operai" by Edgard Larsimon Pergameni, a small building closing the garden to the left of the main entrance, survives from that industrial phase.
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