Today, Italians of all ages will attempt to stick a paper fish on someone’s back without being noticed. The pesce d’Aprile tradition is older than anyone can quite agree on, and considerably more cultured than its name suggests.
Today is 1 April, which means that across Italy a very specific kind of mischief is underway. Children (and fun-loving adults) are cutting out small paper fish and attempting to attach them, undetected, to the backs of the unsuspecting. When the victim eventually discovers their unwitting cargo, the perpetrator shouts “Pesce d’aprile!” — April Fish — and considers their work complete.
It is, by any objective measure, a delightful tradition. It is also one whose origins are contested enough to have kept historians, folklorists and enthusiastic bar arguers occupied for centuries.
The fish, the calendar and the king
The most widely repeated explanation connects April Fools’ Day to the reform of the calendar in 16th-century France. Under the old Julian calendar, the new year began around the end of March or start of April, coinciding with the spring equinox and the end of Lent. When Charles IX of France adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1564, moving New Year’s Day to 1 January, those who hadn’t heard the news — or refused to accept it — continued celebrating the new year in early April. They were mocked with false gifts and silly visits, becoming the butt of pranks that spread across Europe.
The fish entered the picture, in this telling, because early April falls at the end of Lent, when actual fish was a staple of the diet. Also, young, easily caught fish were an established symbol of gullibility and naivety in French and Italian folklore. To call someone a pesce (fish) was to call them a fool: slippery, open-mouthed, easily hooked.
The paper fish stuck to the back is the distinctively Italian and French contribution to the wider April Fools’ tradition. While anglophone countries settled for verbal hoaxes and elaborate set-ups, France and Italy went tactile. The poisson d’avril in French, the pesce d’aprile in Italian, it was the same joke, performed with the same small paper prop, on the same day, across the Alps.
A tradition with Italian flair
Italy has embraced the day with characteristic creativity. The pesce d’aprile is both a physical prank and a catch-all term for any April 1st deception, and Italians have long applied it to everything from domestic wind-ups to elaborate media hoaxes.
Italian newspapers and television programmes have a venerable tradition of running entirely fabricated stories on 1 April — a tradition that requires considerable skill given that the line between satire and plausibility is, in Italian public life, not always easy to locate. The best pesci d’aprile are the ones that are almost believable: the motorway that has been declared a nature reserve, the mayor who has announced that the town is changing its name, the sporting federation that has introduced a rule that nobody asked for but that somehow sounds like it might be real.
The test of a great pesce d’aprile, as any Italian will tell you, is how long you can keep it going before the victim notices; the longer the better. A fish discovered immediately brings mild satisfaction. A fish worn undetected all morning brings glory.
