Gianello's early life remains quite unknown, as he only became famous after Charles recruited him, but it is known he was born in the Duchy of Milan and then naturalized as a Spaniard. His first invention was a couple of highly advanced astronomical clocks, but they were soon overshadowed by a much more prodigious device, the Artificio de Juanelo, a self-powered system that lifted water from the Tagus river to a height of almost 100 meters in order to supply the city of Toledo. Even modern engineers aren't sure of how did it work, as we don't have the whole thing — it remained functional for almost a century until it broke down, and by this point rebuilding it was considered Awesome, but Impractical and thus abandoned. Gianello was apparently a colleague to Blasco de Garay, who built functional paddle-wheelers that were equally abandoned because people at the time believed they would never catch up.
In Spanish folklore, however, Gianello has some relevance thanks to the legend of the Hombre de Palo (roughly "Wooden Man"), a primitive automaton supposedly build by Gianello to collect money for him, essentially a mechanical mendicant, as Gianello was constantly short of funds and, typically for a Spanish inventor, died in poverty and unrecognized. In any case, there are several versions of the legend, some more fantastical than others: some claim it was basically a Clock Punk Golem with true sentience who could bow down to generous donors and fight off thieves with a mace and a shield, while the more realistic-minded speculate it was just some kind of stationary machine who did funny things after putting money on it. In a related note, the Smithsonian Museum currently has a cute monk automaton which might have been built by Gianello after famous Franciscan monk Didacus of Alcalá.
Gianello would be succeeded by Jerónimo de Ayanz, another Spanish multi-inventor that did some wonderful things before being forgotten by history.
In fiction
Literature- Francisco de Quevedo mentions him in his novel El Buscón.
- Ricardo Sánchez Candelas' historical novel Las Grullas del otoño volaron sobre el Tajo adapts Gianello's life.
- Baltasar Magro's El círculo de Juanelo
- El ingeniero y el rey by José Vicente Pascual puts Gianello as an improvised detective in the times of Charles' death.
- Also in La llave maestra by Agustín Sánchez Vidal.
- Antonio Lázaro's Memorias de un Hombre de Palo also tells his story.
