Yet he was not to find a way into the open by matriculating very early, but through an event that unexpectedly threw him into new surroundings of life. In 1894 his parents transferred their abode to Italy. The chronicler has nothing to report of pangs of separation in Albert when he left Bavarian soil. He was glad to get away from the drill academy, Luitpold, and, as an inhabitant of Milan, he enjoyed the change in his existence, and was not encumbered by attacks of home-sickness. All in all, he had felt himself in an unhappy position under school compulsion in Munich, in spite of the mathematical delights he had provided for himself, and in spite of the rapturous moments that musical revelations had created for him since his twelfth year. Defiance and distrust against outside influences had remained active in him as forces that did not allow the happy disposition proper to his age to assert itself. But now the fetters had fallen and the pent-up joy of life burst forth as if through opened sluices. The sun and landscape of the South, Italian manners of life, art freely displayed in the market-place and on the street, realized for him dream-pictures that had appeared to him earlier during the hours of oppression. Whatever he saw, felt, and experienced lay outside the ordinary course of his life, awakened his sense for natural and human things, and set his spirit free from all bonds. There was no question of his going to school in the first six months. He enjoyed complete freedom, occupied himself with literature, and undertook extended excursions. Starting from Pavia, he wandered all alone over the Apennine to Genoa. Whilst he was being intoxicated with the sublime Alpine landscape, he came into contact with the lower stratum of the people, who aroused his deepest sympathy. The tour took him over a short stretch of the Italian Riviera, the beauties of which, as depicted by Böcklin, do not seem to have revealed themselves to him. At that time he was probably subject to a feeling of upward striving such as possessed Zarathustra.