Of the opportunities his new friendship brought him, none became in
after years a pleasanter memory to Odo than his visits with Vittorio to
the latter's uncle, the illustrious architect Count Benedetto Alfieri.
This accomplished and amiable man, who had for many years devoted his
talents to the King's service, was lodged in a palace adjoining the
Academy; and thither, one holiday afternoon, Vittorio conducted his
young friend.

Ignorant as Odo was of all the arts, he felt on the very threshold the
new quality of his surroundings. These tall bare rooms, where busts and
sarcophagi were ranged as in the twilight of a temple, diffused an
influence that lowered the voice and hushed the step. In the
semi-Parisian capital where French architects designed the King's
pleasure-houses and the nobility imported their boudoir-panellings from
Paris and their damask hangings from Lyons, Benedetto Alfieri
represented the old classic tradition, the tradition of the "grand
manner," which had held its own through all later variations of taste,
running parallel with the barocchismo of the seventeenth century and the
effeminate caprices of the rococo period. He had lived much in Rome, in
the company of men like Winckelmann and Maffei, in that society where
the revival of classical research was being forwarded by the liberality
of Princes and Cardinals and by the indefatigable zeal of the scholars
in their pay. From this centre of aesthetic reaction Alfieri had
returned to the Gallicized Turin, with its preference for the graceful
and ingenious rather than for the large, the noble, the restrained;
bringing to bear on the taste of his native city the influence of a view
raised but perhaps narrowed by close study of the past: the view of a
generation of architects in whom archeological curiosity had stifled the
artistic instinct, and who, instead of assimilating the spirit of the