He was born in the year 1749, at Asti,
a little city of that Piedmont where there has always been a greater
regard for feudal traditions than in any other part of Italy; and he
belonged by birth to a nobility which is still the proudest in Europe.
"What a singular country is ours!" said the Chevalier Nigra, one
of the first diplomats of our time, who for many years managed the
delicate and difficult relations of Italy with France during the
second empire, but who was the son of an apothecary. "In Paris they
admit me everywhere; I am asked to court and petted as few Frenchmen
are; but here, in my own city of Turin, it would not be possible for
me to be received by the Marchioness Doria;" and if this was true
in the afternoon of the nineteenth century, one easily fancies what
society must have been at Turin in the forenoon of the eighteenth.
I
It was in the order of the things of that day and country that Alfieri
should leave home while a child and go to school at the Academy of
Turin. Here, as he tells in that most amusing autobiography of his, he
spent several years in acquiring a profound ignorance of whatever
he was meant to learn; and he came away a stranger not only to the
humanities, but to any one language, speaking a barbarous mixture of
French and Piedmontese, and reading little or nothing.
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