«El jardín de la América meridional»… ciencia como deleite, información y el encanto de los jardines ingleses en un naturalista chileno en el Illuminismo italiano

Abstract

This article seeks to explore one of South America’s diverse cultural representations pro­duced by one of the many expelled Jesuits who settled in Settecento Italy: Chilean naturalist and historian Juan Ignacio Molina (1740-1829). The metaphorical expression “the Garden of America” plunges us into the cultural controversies surrounding a historical object – the special kind of natural scenery constituted by a garden – that has been studied little by cul­tural historians. By studying Molina’s natural history of Chile and a report on English gardens he defended in Bologna’s Academy of Sciences in the early nineteenth century, it can be maintained that, in view of the information sources on which he drew in these works, in the specific cultural setting of Italian Illuminismo, the Chilean naturalist can be considered a pre-Romantic author.