Once upon a time, 1 April, as the young and beautiful Proserpina, daughter of Ceres -the Roman Goddess of the harvest- was out picking flowers in a sunny meadow, Pluto, the King of the Underworld, spied her and decided there and then to make her his queen. Immediately a chasm opened in the ground, the God thundered out from the Underworld in his chariot drawn by four black horses and stole the protesting girl away. Noticing that her daughter was missing, Ceres desperatly sought her all day, followng her cries for help, but it was only late in the evening that, exhausted, she realized that she had been deceived by the cry of the nymph Echo, who had been given this deceptive task by Pluto. 

A beautiful sculpture by Gianlorenzo Bernini (1621-22) representing rape of Proserpina can be found in the Museo Borghese, commissioned by Cardinal Scipione Borghese. The dog with three heads who stands at Pluto's feet is Cerberus, guardian of the entrance to Hell. In his description of the Inferno in the Divine Commedy Dante Alighieri places Cerberus at the entrance to the third circle watching over the greedy and the gluttons (Inferno, Canto VI). In remembrance of the Rape of Proserpina the ancient Romans used to celebrate the 'Feste Cereali' at the beginning of April. This feastival usually closed with a mime, re-enacting this story. Some historians believe that this story, in which Pluto made a fool of Ceres, could be the origin of the tradition of jokes on 1 April: April Fools' Day. In Italian we call these jokes 'Pesci d'Aprile', perhaps because the Sun leaves the zodiacal sign of the constellation of Pisces (Pesci) later in the month or because of some fishes destiny to end their lives hooked! 

This tradition survived through the ages with Romans playing practical jokes upon each other on 1 April. These jokes were always of a childish nature, as described by the Roman poet Giggi Zanazzo [1860-1911 founder in 1887 of the magazine 'Rugantino' , which was written in Roman dialect]. These are a few of the tricks described by Zanazzo: some spots of black ink were dropped into the 'holy water font' in church, making the faithful look like chimney sweeps as they blessed themselves; a shops' window displays were temporarily exchanged, creating confusion among the sleepy first customers; sometimes a wall would have been built during the night in place of a shop's door and placed against it a Vespasiano (a Roman public urinal -a rare antique thesedays) much to the astonishment of the shopowner (as in the film 'Il Marchese del Grillo', with Alberto Sordi). This is the way, then, that Romans organized their 'pesci d'Aprile' using good-humoured imagination.