Odo’s eagerness to see and learn filled Count Benedetto with a simple joy.  He brought forth all his treasures for the boy’s instruction and the two spent many an afternoon poring over Piranesi’s Roman etchings, Maffei’s Verona Illustrata, and Count Benedetto’s own elegant pencil-drawings of classical remains.  Like all students of his day he had also his cabinet of antique gems and coins, from which Odo obtained more intimate glimpses of that buried life so marvellously exhumed before him:  hints of traffic in far-off market-places and familiar gestures of hands on which those very jewels might have sparkled.  Nor did the Count restrict the boy’s enquiries to that distant past; and for the first time Odo heard of the masters who had maintained the great classical tradition on Latin soil:  Sanmichele, Vignola, Sansovino, and the divine Michael Angelo, whom the old architect never named without baring his head.  From the works of these architects Odo formed his first conception of the earlier, more virile manner which the first contact with Graeco-Roman antiquity had produced.  The Count told him, too, of the great painters whose popularity had been lessened, if their fame had not been dimmed, by the more recent achievements of Correggio, Guido, Guercino, and the Bolognese school.  The splendour of the stanze of the Vatican, the dreadful majesty of the Sistine ceiling, revealed to Odo the beauty of that unmatched moment before grandeur broke into bombast.  His early association with the expressive homely art of the chapel at Pontesordo and with the half-pagan beauty of Luini’s compositions had formed his taste on soberer lines than the fashion of the day affected; and his imagination breathed freely on the heights of the Latin Parnassus.  Thus, while his friend Vittorio stormed up and down the quiet rooms, chattering about his horses, boasting of his escapades, or ranting against the tyranny of the Sardinian government, Odo, at the old Count’s side, was entering on the great inheritance of the past.

Such an initiation was the more precious to him from the indifference of those about him to all forms of liberal culture.  Among the greater Italian cities, Turin was at that period the least open to new influences, the most rigidly bound up in the formulas of the past.  While Milan, under the Austrian rule, was becoming a centre of philosophic thought; while Naples was producing a group of economists such as Galiani, Gravina and Filangieri; while ecclesiastical Rome was dedicating herself to the investigation of ancient art and polity, and even flighty Venice had her little set of “liberals,” who read Voltaire and Hume and wept over the rights of man, the old Piedmontese capital lay in the grasp of a bigoted clergy and of a reigning house which was already preparing to superimpose Prussian militarism on the old feudal discipline of the border.  Generations of hard fighting and rigorous living had developed in the nobles the qualities which were preparing them