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,...See more

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. See less