In 1552 she removed with her children to Naples, where Torquato was sent at once to the school which the Jesuits had opened there in the preceding year.

These astute instructors soon perceived that they had no ordinary boy to deal with.

They did their best to stimulate his mental faculties and to exalt his religious sentiments; so that he learned Greek and Latin before the age of ten, and was in the habit of communicating at the altar with transports of pious ecstasy in his ninth year.[5] The child recited speeches and poems in public, and received an elementary training in the arts of composition.

He was in fact the infant prodigy of those plausible Fathers, the prize specimen of their educational method.

As might have been expected, this forcing system overtaxed his nerves.