Relish of Folly

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.

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.