Palazzo Sichardt, in the past also called Palazzo Jacob or Scopoli-Jacob, is an eighteenth-century palace in Rovereto, with its main front on via Calcinari. It was built for the Sichardt, merchants from Nuremberg, as a warehouse and base for businesses tied to silk: attached to it was a silk-throwing mill, driven by a water wheel fed from the Leno through a millrace. It then passed to the Scopoli and Jacob families, and in 1910 became the property of the town council.
What to see
The building is solid, on four floors. The mill, the first built on the «roza piccola», in 1709, employed twenty-five women and seven men; later the millrace was covered over and the wheel demolished, and the former mill became council offices.
In 1939 the palace was given to the Museo civico, which opened its seat there in 1942 and kept it as its main seat almost to the end of the twentieth century. After the restoration, completed in 2019, it is the home of the Museo della Città.
Visiting
Opening times and tickets for the Museo della Città should be checked on the website of the Fondazione Museo Civico di Rovereto.
Our editors' tip
In the early fifties the museum risked closing: in a period of crisis the mayor proposed turning the palace into a private dwelling. Umberto Tomazzoni replied with a passionate letter in defence of the institution, the idea was dropped and the museum received more funds than before.
