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 for the great part their country was to play; and contact with the
Waldensian and Calvinist heresies had stiffened Piedmontese piety into a
sombre hatred of schism and a minute observance of the mechanical rules
of the faith. Such qualities could be produced only at the expense of
intellectual freedom; and if Piedmont could show a few nobles like
Massimo d'Azeglio's father, who "made the education of his children his
first and gravest thought" and supplemented the deficiencies of his
wife's conventual training by "consecrating to her daily four hours of
reading, translating and other suitable exercises," the commoner view
was that of Alfieri's own parents, who frequently repeated in their
son's hearing "the old maxim of the Piedmontese nobility" that there is
no need for a gentleman to be a scholar. Such at any rate was the
opinion of the old Marquess of Donnaz, and of all the frequenters of
Casa Valdu. Odo's stepfather was engrossed in the fulfilment of his
duties about the court, and Donna Laura, under the influence of poverty
and ennui, had sunk into a state of rigid pietism; so that the lad, on
his visits to his mother, found himself in a world where art was
represented by the latest pastel-portrait of a court beauty, literature
by Liguori's Glories of Mary or the blessed Battista's Mental Sorrows of
Christ, and history by the conviction that Piedmont's efforts to stamp
out the enemies of the Church had distinguished her above every other
country of Europe. Donna L