The moment he felt himself free he determined to start again on his travels. On reaching Vienna, the Sardinian minister offered to introduce him to Metastasio; but he cared nothing at that time for any Italian author, and, moreover, had taken a great dislike to the poet, from having seen him make a servile genuflexion to the Empress Maria Theresa in the Imperial Gardens at Schönbrunn. On entering the dominions of Frederick the Great, he was made extremely indignant by the military despotism that reigned there. When presented to the king he did not appear in uniform.
"The minister asked me the reason of this, seeing that I was in the service of my own sovereign. I replied, 'Because there are already enough uniforms here.' The king said to me his usual four words; I watched him attentively, fixing my eyes respectfully on his, and thanked Heaven that I was not born his slave."
Denmark, Sweden, and Russia, were then successively visited by him. He had heard so much of the latter country, that when he reached St. Petersburgh his expectations were wrought up to a great pitch.
"But, alas! no sooner did I set foot in this Asiatic encampment of tents, than I called to mind Rome, Genoa, Venice, and Florence, and began to laugh. The longer I remained in the country, the more were my first impressions confirmed, and I left it with the precious conviction that it was not worth seeing."
He refused to be presented to the celebrated female autocrat, Catherine II., whom he stigmatizes as "a philosophical Clytemnestra."
He next visited England for the second time, arriving at the end of 1770. During his stay in London, which lasted for seven months, he became involved in an affair which excited an extraordinary sensation at the time, and which is even remembered by the scandal-mongers of the present day. He formed the acquaintance of the wife of an officer of high rank in the Guards, and this intimacy soon assumed a criminal character. Her husband, a man of a very jealous temperament, suspected his wife's infidelity, and had them watched. On finding his suspicions confirmed, he challenged Alfieri, and they fought a duel with swords in the Green Park, in which the future poet was wounded in the arm. The husband pressed for a divorce, and Alfieri announced his intention of marrying the lady as soon as she was free; but, to his horror, she confessed to him one day, what was already known to the public through the newspapers, although he was ignorant of it, that before she knew him she had been engaged in an intrigue with a groom of her husband! Despite this discovery, it was some time before his affection for her abated; but at length, on her announcing her determination to enter a convent in France, he quitted her at Rochester, and left this country himself almost immediately afterwards. He went to Paris, and there bought a collection of the principal Italian poets and prose-writers in thirty-six volumes, which from that time became his inseparable companions, although he did not make much use of them for two or three years. However, he now learned to know at least something of the six great luminaries, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Boccaccio, and Machiavelli.
He next proceeded to Spain and Portugal. At Lisbon he formed the acquaintance of the Abate Tommaso di Caluso, younger brother of the Sardinian minister. The society of this distinguished man produced the most beneficial effect on him. One evening, when the Abate was reading to him the fine Ode to Fortune of Alessandro Guidi, a poet whose name he had never even heard, some of the stanzas produced such extraordinary transports in him, that the former told him that he was born to write verses. This sudden impulse of Apollo, as he calls it, was however only a momentary flush, which was soon extinguished, and remained buried for a long time to come.
He now bent his steps homewards, and reached Turin in May, 1772, after an absence of three years. He took a magnificent house in the Piazza di San Carlo, furnished it sumptuously, and commenced leading a merry life with about a dozen friends, who formed a society, which met at his house every week. This Society was governed by strict rules, one of which was that all should contribute something in writing for their reciprocal amusement; these contributions being placed in a chest, of which the president for the time being kept the key, and read aloud by him at their meetings. They were all written in French, and Alfieri mentions one of his which was very successful. It described the Deity at the last judgment demanding from every soul an account of itself, and the characters he drew were all those of well-known individuals, both male and female, in Turin.
It was not long before he fell in love for the third time, the object of his passion now being a lady some years older than himself, and of somewhat doubtful reputation. For the space of nearly two years she exercised unbounded dominion over him. Feeling that he could not support the fetters of Venus and of Mars at one and the same time, he with some little difficulty obtained permission to throw up his commission in the army.
While attending at his mistress's bedside, during an illness by which she was attacked in January, 1744, the idea first struck him of writing a dramatic sketch. He wrote it without the slightest plan, in the form of a dialogue between three persons, called respectively, Photinus, Lachesis, and Cleopatra. He gives a specimen of it in a note, and it is certainly not of the very highest order of merit. On the recovery of the lady he placed it under the cushion of her couch, where it remained forgotten for a year, and thus were the first fruits of his tragic genius brooded over, as it were, by the lady and all who chanced to sit upon the couch.