Conservatory of Arts and Crafts. During this period, he wrote many essays on the relationship between art, science and social progress, a theme on which he would defend his thesis. In 1862 he went to Belgium, enrolling at the Free University of Brussels, but rarely attending classes. All these studies profoundly marked his character and thought, and he began to dedicate himself to classical studies and to be concerned with the artist's civil responsibility and his political commitment. There he began to organize his synthetic philosophy, where the arts were, for him, the true promoters of social progress, and should be cultivated on a humanist basis, mirroring the example of the classical Greeks and the Renaissance. At this time, he also visited the Salon des Refusés, in Paris, where they exhibited artists who remained outside the official circuit, which was important in bringing him into contact with the pre-modernist avant-gardes. At a certain point, he ended up in financial difficulties, but managed to supplement his academic pension with help from the Provincial Assembly of Paraíba in 1863. In 1864, visiting Scotland by boat, he was saved from a shipwreck. In the same year he returned to Brazil, recalled back by the emperor to participate in a competition for professor of Figurative Drawing in the Industrial Design course at the Imperial Academy. He won it with the work Sócrates afastando Alcebíades dos braços do vício, but did not assume the chair. Américo visited his hometown, which he would recreate in his novels, where he found a brother who was born in the year of his departure and worried about the poverty of his relatives. Back in Rio de Janeiro, he published a pioneering series of essays on aesthetics and art history in the journal Correio Mercantil, but soon after, asking for leave without pay, he returned to Europe. In 1865 he wandered, largely on foot, through several countries. He began his journey from Paris to Strasbourg, then to the Grand Duchy of Baden, the Netherlands and Denmark. He then continued through Morocco, Sicily, the Greek islands, and Algeria, which was something of a Mecca for many painters of his generation who were interested in exotic settings. There he worked as a draftsman for the French government, making records of human types, landscapes and animals in the region. The publication, in French, of his first novel, Holocausto, which was only translated to