Relish of Folly

By Rudolph Altrocchi

Three recent graduates of Harvard take a joyous, carefree summer road trip through Europe in 1909 in a roofless Fiat Touring car. Like most tourists, their major goal was to soak-in the history and culture of Italy, Switzerland, Germany and France.

A major secondary purpose, however, was to permeate their trip with the joys and mirth of Folly, following the basic precepts of Desiderius Erasmus in his 1511 book In Praise of Folly: "Without some relish of folly, no banquet is pleasing. Nor is human life in general but a kind of fool's game."

Follow these fun-loving young men in their escapades through Europe — one a precocious businessman, one a newly graduated lawyer, the third a Ph.D. candidate training to become a university professor. All three firmly believed that mirth is a condition of supreme well-being and happiness and therefore should pervasively characterize their trip.

Prepare to laugh as you join this adventuresome journey of shenanigans and follies, told in a buoyant, exuberant manner against the backdrop of a Europe completely unaware of the looming catastrophe of World War I which would begin just five years later and cause 40 million deaths.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664148529

Rudolph Altrocchi

Rudolph Altrocchi was born in Florence, Italy, in 1882 of a quadrilingual European mother and a bilingual American father, becoming fluent in English, Italian and French at an early age. Emigrating to Missouri at the age of eighteen, he bought and managed a hog farm, then decided to continue his education and entered Harvard as the only trilingual pig farmer in the Class of 1908. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in Italian Language and Literature in 1914 and taught at Harvard, Columbia, Chicago and Brown before becoming Chairman of the Department of Italian at the University of California in Berkeley from 1928 to 1948, creating the largest and best Italian Department in the country.

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Copyright © 2021 by Paul Hemenway Altrocchi.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 12/22/2020

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

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CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1     Preliminaries Ad Absurdum

Chapter 2     Let the Follies Begin

Chapter 3     La Serenissima

Chapter 4     Playful Spirit

Chapter 5     Whopper Time

Chapter 6     Fiammetta Invades Gaul

Chapter 7     Follies of a Different Kind

Chapter 8     German Pot Pourri

Chapter 9     Rusty Recital from Heaven

Chapter 10   Justice in Rheims

Chapter 11   Très Jolie Cochon

Chapter 12   Cobblestones of Paris

"Without some relish of folly, no banquet is pleasing.

Nor is human life in general but a kind of fool’s game."

- Desiderius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly, 1511

DEDICATION

To my Dear Friends

and

Fellow-Villains,

Ralph Henry Lachmund

of San Francisco

and

LeRoy Jackson Snyder

of Kansas City, Missouri

I dedicate this Record of Laughter Abroad.

2021 Preface

In early June 1949, my father Rudolph Altrocchi retired as Professor of Italian Language and Literature at the University of California at the age of sixty-six. He had been Departmental Chairman from 1929 to 1947 and had built the department into the largest and best in the country.

We always spent summers on a Michigan bluff overlooking Lake Michigan in a small cottage with no electricity, no running water and no indoor plumbing. Rudolph decided to taper himself from academia by spending the summer of ’49 writing a description of his trip to Europe in 1909 with his two best friends from Harvard, Roy Snyder and Ralph Lachmund.

Roy and Rudolph were members of the Class of 1908. Their friendship was nurtured by both being members of the Glee Club. Roy had a superb singing voice and was one of the Club’s four soloists. After graduation in June of 1908, Roy returned to his hometown of Kansas City, Missouri, as a budding businessman. He immediately went into the natural gas business, developing wells and being the first to supply gas to homes in Missouri and Kansas. The potential was great — he saw the opportunity, grabbed it and was very successful for two decades. He didn’t do well in the depression nor did he thrive afterwards, trying to go it alone and resist the greater efficiency and cost-cutting of large conglomerates. In 1909, however, his business looked very promising so he decided to celebrate by inviting his two best friends, Rudolph and Ralph, on a two-month jaunt through Europe with Roy financing the car and the round-trip travel expenses. Both invitees quickly accepted.

Ralph was six feet five inches tall, weighed 240 pounds and had played first string interior lineman for Stanford, graduating as a Phi Beta Kappa scholar in 1906. He entered Harvard Law School in the fall of 1906. Normally, students in different schools of a university don’t mix much but Ralph had an excellent baritone singing voice and loved singing, so he became an enthusiastic member of the Harvard Glee Club soon after arriving in Cambridge. He immediately hit it off with Roy and Rudolph and they soon became best friends. From the beginning, joking around, folly and laughter became intrinsic and important ingredients of their friendship.

When the three R’s — Roy, Ralph and Rudolph — began their European escapade in late June of 1909, Ralph had just graduated from law school. His subsequent career as a Plaintiffs’ Attorney in San Francisco was very successful. His eloquent presentations and humorous demeanor in Court led to admiration and friendship from judges and adversarial lawyers alike. Along the way, he married Lorna, a very attractive German-American opera singer.

Rudolph had a more complicated past history. He was born in Florence, Italy, in 1882, the son of Giovanni, a gifted pianist, composer and teacher of piano who had himself been born in New York City. Giovanni was the son of Domenico who had been one of Garibaldi’s leaders in the guerrilla movement to free Italy from Austrian occupation and tyranny. When the Austrians were initially triumphant, Garibaldi fled to Argentina where he helped liberate that country from Spanish occupation, then returned to Europe a decade later and, after a long struggle, did liberate Italy, becoming one of their great national heroes.

Domenico Altrocchi, meanwhile, fled to New York City where he established the finest music school in the city and married one of his most talented students of piano, Pauline Hemenway when she was seventeen and he was thirty-seven. Their three children, Nicola, Giovanni and Maria were all born in New York City. Pauline only spoke English to their childen but Domenico spoke Italian to them. Older brother Nicola Altrocchi graduated from Harvard in the Class of 1872, became a lawyer, married a graduate of Smith College and settled in Connecticut.

When Pauline Hemenway Altrocchi developed recurrent fevers of unknown origin in the 1860s, Domenico’s family moved back to warmer Italy, buying a villa in Fiesole in the hills above Florence. Giovanni studied music with Italy’s best masters, married Pauline Zamvos of Florence who was quadrilingual, and settled down in the Altrocchi villa given to them by Domenico.

Rudolph was born in 1882 in the villa. He was brought up speaking American English in the home, attended the Joseph Domenge French School in Florence from first grade through high school, with all subjects being taught in French. He studied German in high school. He was therefore fluent in English, French, and Italian and could speak and understand basic German. When his father Giovanni suddenly died by suicide in 1899 for reasons never clear to any of his descendants, the family was so devastated that they moved to Milan. Rudolph was sent to a boarding school in Zurich for the summer where he roomed with George Weston from Boston. One year later, still completely shaken by the suicide, Pauline Zamvos Altrocchi and her son, Rudolph, decided to move to the United States (where both were already citizens, Pauline by marriage and Rudolph by being registered at birth with the American Consulate in Florence). They used a small inheritance to buy a pig farm in the Missouri Ozarks which Rudolph successfully managed for two years.

They enjoyed the farm, far from the madding crowd, and Rudolph at the age of nineteen became quadrilingual when he learned to speak fluent Pig from his protégés. Three years later, George Weston suddenly appeared, having graduated from Harvard College. George put considerable pressure on Rudolph to stop his wanderings and go to college. After many vigorous debates, Rudolph finally asked, If I do decide to go to college, where should I go?

Harvard, of course, you nincompoop! You belong there; you would fit in well and your uncle graduated from there in 1872! Rudolph applied and was accepted if he took summer prep courses in missing subjects, which he immediately did in Kansas City. Thus did he become the only quadrilingual pig farmer in Harvard’s Class of 1908.

He loved college life immediately, did well, greatly enjoyed the Glee Club and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He fulfilled all of his undergraduate requirements in three years and spent his senior year taking his Master’s Degree. He then began Harvard’s Ph.D. Program in Italian Studies in September of 1908. So, when he accepted Roy Snyder’s offer of a trip to Europe beginning in late June of 1909, he had completed two years of grad school, studying to become a Professor of Italian Language and Literature. He finally got his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1914 after doing research for two years at the University of Florence.

Growing up in Berkeley, this editor witnessed first-hand the lifelong close friendship between two of the culprits, Ralph Lachmund, the eloquent, humorous singing lawyer of San Francisco, and my father, Rudolph, Head of the Dept. of Italian at the University of California in Berkeley across the bay. During dinner parties at our home in Berkeley, on several occasions I heard Ralph and Rudolph recount humorous anecdotes from their 1909 trip to Europe, always eliciting loud laughter. Although a couple of the incidents of folly might be interpreted by some as being consistent with behavior of sufficient naughtiness to fulfill what Eugene Burdick and William Lederer might label a generation later as antics of ugly Americans, I submit that the three jovial perpetrators, all in their twenties, were behaving sufficiently within the framework of their post-college culture in 1909 and with appropriate fun-loving innocence that such an appellation should not apply.

I repeatedly urged my father to write a book about that summer trip with Ralph and Roy even though it was long ago. In June of 1949 in Harbert, Michigan, as a new retiree he finally began writing that book in longhand, forty years after the trip. After preparing the second draft of the book, he titled it Short of Murder and had it typed. He still gave priority to the writing of scholarly articles.

During a family trip to Italy in the summer of 1950, after I had completed my sophomore year at Harvard College, he told me that he felt that books about journeys should be more timely and that he had waited much too long, so he was reluctant to send his manuscript to a publisher. I told him I agreed with his conclusion in general but, since I had personally heard his and Ralph’s amusing descriptions of the trip, I felt that their European follies were of sufficient quality and humor to justify publication even at such a late date. Rudolph Altrocchi never did write a third draft and he never sent it to a publisher. He died on May 13, 1953, at the age of seventy from diabetic coma while I was completing my first year at Harvard Medical School.

I inherited the manuscript but it lay fallow for another sixty-seven years before my daughter, Catherine, suggested that I consider it as a Personal Pandemic Project during the COVID-19 epidemic of 2020-2021. Despite depicting events of one hundred and eleven years ago, the editor believes that the book, now titled Relish of Folly, is still sufficiently out of the ordinary and humorous to be worthy of publication even though the pranks, thoughts, wording and humor are somewhat macho. Their bias is indeed male — of foot-loose and fancy-free young men in their twenties, traveling in Europe far from home at the turn of the 20th Century.

Paul Hemenway Altrocchi, MD

Honolulu, Hawaii

January 2021

Chapter 1

PRELIMINARIES AD ABSURDUM

We were three old Harvard buddies who gathered themselves and their wits in Florence, Italy, in late June of 1909. Roy had just bought a jaunty new red Fiat and, in his youthful generosity, had invited us two to partake of a zig-zag trip through Europe for the side-purpose of our educational fulfillment but primarily for the enlightenment of those we encountered.

With what glee we had accepted ... all being Glee Clubbers in Cambridge. As we sat in Roy’s room in the Pensione Piccioli, we discussed our impending trip, having wisely assigned a goodly number of days for overcoming diverse Italian bureaucratic impediments.

It was Ralph, our pet giant, perhaps having a better feel for essential human priorities, who one day said: We three and our chauffeur make a grand quartet but are singularly devoid of the so-called ‘fairer sex.’ Shouldn’t we consider trying to fill that void in our young lives?

That can be remedied, said I, the budding professor, with a dash of Anglo-Saxon resourcefulness. Although there is no extra room in our car, which has only four and a half seats, including a jump seat in front, I’ve got an idea which might bring some diversion into our lives as we prepare for our trip. Let’s put an ad in the local papers and ask for a little company, feminine singular.

This, as was all of our future folly on the trip, no sooner said than agreed upon. I knew Italian as one of my two native tongues since I had been conceived, born and raised in Florence, so I did the wording for the ad which I then read to them, translating from my Italian. Here it is, boys: ‘Handsome American millionaire …’

Wait a minute, interrupted Roy, the modest one. What kind of tommyrot is that?

Objection overruled, blurted our legal genius, Ralph.

I continued: Handsome American millionaire seeks female companion on auto trip through Europe. All expenses paid. Address J.T. Smith, Poste Restante, Florence. Anonymous responses not accepted.

Then Roy suggested an addition: Have ‘em enclose a photo so we can use our higher intellectual powers in the analysis.

The addition was approved. The ad was to run for two days beginning the next day in the Personals section of the two Florentine newspapers, La Nazione and Fieramosca (named after the family who owned it).

Our legal mastermind brought up a point: What if the post office asks one of us, whoever functions as J.T. Smith, for proof of identification? This potential hurdle was easily surmounted. We decided to put in a rush order for a hundred calling cards in the name of our ghost writer Smith, costing three francs. To make doubly sure, we rented a box at the Firenze Post Office, number 58, two francs. Total of five francs, one dollar. We were investing heavily in this promising and vital initial part of our escapade.

Within three days our highly original pseudonym received some two pounds of mail. Roy urgently summoned us to a meeting of our Regal Committee of Three Bachelors to sort it out. First we discarded half a dozen males who had sneaked in, the cheats. Also because they had, of course, not enclosed photos. But our detective wisdom easily unearthed their ill-concealed masculinity. We also discarded all female applicants whose photographs highly suggested a terrible disease — advanced age ... meaning anyone over twenty-seven. Also discarded, of course, were homely faces, ugly figures or over-cosmetization suggesting self-selling professionals. This reduced our mail to about half a pound.

The more eligible candidates we scrutinized a second time and graded, giving thirteen C’s, three B’s and one A-. The D’s and F’s had already been sifted out. It pleased us to think that in the fair city of Florence there were seventeen girls who were breathlessly awaiting a reply which would, perhaps, hitch their wagons to a rich and exciting comet ... or perhaps three.

Here’s a pretty one, Roy said. But her beak’s too large.

Experienced with local Florentine girls, I replied, Italian girls almost always have large beaks. If you are looking for a pug-nosed American girl, they don’t exist here. Italian girls are mostly Roman-nosed, with rather prominent proboscises placed between sultry, passionate black eyes. She was cruelly waste-basketed by perhaps overly-critical youthful perfectionists.

Ralph thought a third one had considerable charm until I found a blemish. Look at that blouse, a fashion of long ago; also her hairdo is antique. The photo was probably taken ten years ago. I’ll bet she’s at least thirty-five by now. Only experienced professors can handle such ancientness, so she’s out!

We discarded several more. One was anvil-jawed, we agreed; she looked more prone to bite than kiss. Another was platter-faced, as Roy called it, and had mouse-tailed eyebrows. Still another was chinless, no character, her nostrils were too wide, almost simian; another was turtle-mouthed with too many hairs on her upper lip. We were young, wanting an inspiring companion, not a museum piece, so we were rather choosy. We preferred to call ourselves idealistic.

We finally discarded all but nine. To these I was ordered to pen a favorable reply. To the others we returned the photos with courteous words. I used all of my polished Ivy League rhetoric and my reserve supply of mendacity, something like this: Owing to sad and unforeseeable circumstances, the auto trip of Mr. Smith has been indefinitely postponed. Very sorry — Yours truly.

To the nine favorable ones my style was undiluted saccharine: Having carefully examined your application and gazed with gusto at your photograph, captivating to say the least, I beg you, gentle Signorina, to be so gracious as to meet me at 11 AM sharp, next Saturday under the porticos of the Church of Santissima Annunziata wearing, for the sake of recognition, a red carnation on your blouse. Anticipating the pleasure of making your delightful acquaintance, I am, eagerly and Sincerely Yours, J.T. Smith.

Guess I’m pretty good at the Lie Courteous, I commented to my fellow schemers. We all agreed that lack of complete forthrightness might appear once or twice again during our trip but the least we could do is always appear innocent and create the tone of being Proper Bostonian.

Why had I suggested that particular church? Because just across the street was the Foundling Asylum which Florentines so charitably call Ospedale degli Innocenti, with a row of large columns above a flight of steps. From such a clever vantage point we could watch the carnal and carnational parade while clandestinely hiding behind the columns.

What a parade it was! First came, with mincing steps, a dame petite, indeed pint-sized. She must have been all of four feet ten, including her four-inch heels. And how painted! Proper girls do not paint themselves! Peeping cautiously from behind three columns, each one of us signaled thumbs down.

When she got half-way down the church portico, she saw another girl coming towards her with a red carnation. Immediately, with a quick motion she placed her gloved hand modestly over her left breast to conceal her tell-tale flower and then looked poignards at her rival. The latter had a luscious, confident swing in her stride and a perfect figure. But even from where we were, with opera-glasses, we could guess that her yellow hair was dyed and that her bust was somewhat ... overstated. Such defects had not appeared in her photograph. Roy signaled a question mark but his eyes showed more than a hint of doubt.

The third one did look somewhat like her photo but which clearly had been taken more than a decade earlier. Thumbs down, unanimously, accompanied by negative shakings of our heads as we encountered a clear case of ... pathos. Or was she just pathetic? And on they came.

Each put her hand on the bosomy flower as soon as she saw another carnationed candidate approaching. But they kept prancing up and down in front of the church