It is singular that the young man, witnessing the wretchedness of his father's life, should not have shunned a like career of gilded misery and famous indigence.
But Torquato was born to reproduce Bernardo's qualities in their feebleness and respectability, to outshine him in genius, and to outstrip him in the celebrity of his misfortunes.
In the absence of his father little Torquato grew up with his mother and sister at Sorrento under the care of a good man, Giovanni Angeluzzo who gave him the first rudiments of education.

He was a precocious infant, grave in manners, quick at learning, free from the ordinary naughtinesses of childhood.

Manso reports that he began to speak at six months, and that from the first he formed syllables with precision.

His mother Porzia appears to have been a woman of much grace and sweetness, but timid and incapable of fighting the hard battle of the world.

A certain shade of melancholy fell across the boy's path even in these earliest years, for Porzia, as we have seen, met with cruel treatment from her relatives, and her only support, Bernardo, was far away in exile.