Buon Pesce d’Aprile! Good April Fish?!
While the April Fools’ Day tradition is celebrated in many countries, not just Italy, the Italians embrace it as they love to play tricks. The idea of the modern April Fools’ Day is rooted in Chaucer. In his 1392 tale, the first prankster is the fox who tricks the vain cock Chauntecleer.
Th ancient roots of April Fools’ Day, however, are based on the Roman festival of Hilaria.
Oh, those Romans! Hilaria festivals, a Roman tradition, were celebrated on the vernal equinox to honour the goddess Cybele. She was seen as The Great Mother and was worshiped in Rome, as a source of Roman power and military success. Cybele was not a woman to be messed with and was one of the original scorned lovers. She fell in love with a mortal, Attis, and when his attention strayed to a human woman, she made him go insane, caused him to castrate and then kill himself. (Think of the business she could do if she hired that skill out!) Flowers grew from his blood and his body became a tree.
Romans rejoiced that after the long winter, this was the first day of the year when the day was longer than the night. As they always loved a good party, they celebrated this with eight days of festivities. The last day of the celebration, Hilaria, honoured the resurrection of Attis, with merry-making and feasting. This was traditionally held on March 25.
All day long, people participated in games and pranks and other forms of entertainment. The highlight of the celebration was the elaborate masquerade where Romans disguised themselves as other Romans, imitated powerful and prestigious higher-ups and participated in light-hearted pranks and mockings along the way.
The modern-day custom is supposed to have started in the sixteenth century, but it only really became popular in Genoa, Italy in the mid to late 1800s. This tradition caught on and was practiced among all levels of society, including the upper classes.
Today in Italy, people celebrate it by playing practical jokes (fare uno scherzo), pulling a friend’s leg (prendere un amico in giro), telling a funny story(raccontare una barzelletta), or making silly remarks (dire sciocchezze).
Italians like having fun and enjoying general silliness on this day on which anything goes. Children stick a paper cutout of a fish (or a pesciolino) to the back of their classmates, and the longer it is before until the friend finds out, the funnier the joke. The children then chant: L’hai visto? (Have you seen him?) Chi? (Who?) Il pesce d’aprile!!! (The April fish/fool.)
[Why a fish? Best guess is that this has something to do with Pisces, the zodiac sign for April, which is a fish.]
The oldest Pesce d’Aprile joke in Italy was in Bologna around the 12th century, carried out by Buoncompango. He said that he had invented a flying machine and promised that on April 1 he would fly over the town (is this where Da Vinci got his original idea?). The town went crazy, everyone turned up to see him fly. He arrived wearing a huge pair of wings but stated that since the wind conditions were not favourable, he would be unable to fly.
The media also loves this day and there have been some pretty famous tricks played over the years. With the internet, a hoax is easily spread, but it takes longer to get the word out that it really is a hoax. Google loves to play April Fools’ Day pranks, and has usually does one every year since 2000 when they did the “Google Mentalplex“. The Google search bar invited the viewer to stare at a spinning pinwheel, remove their hat and glasses, do not move your head, and envision what the viewer wanted to see when the spinning pinwheel was clicked. Clicking resulted in a web search page of April Fols’s Day items and a changing series of “Error” messages.
Although the following media joke isn’t from Italy, it very easily could have been, as it is Italian-themed. This is perhaps one of the best media April Fools’ jokes ever. It was done by the BBC news show Panorama and is known as the “BBC Spaghetti Harvest in Switzerland”. Here is a quote from Hoaxs.org from its list of the top 100 April Fools’ Day jokes of all time:
“The respected BBC news show Panorama announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Huge numbers of viewers were taken in. Many called the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this, the BBC diplomatically replied, “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.” Even the director-general of the BBC later admitted that after seeing the show he checked in an encyclopedia to find out if that was how spaghetti actually grew (but the encyclopedia had no information on the topic).”
The broadcast remains, by far, the most popular and widely-acclaimed April Fool’s Day hoax ever. Enjoy!
Buon Pesce d’Aprile….and check your back for fish!
