However, a very elaborate April Fool's joke was made by the BBC in 1957 and it was partly about Italy. It was a short documentary about a Swiss farming family who had managed to eradicate the spaghetti weevil and were now harvesting an extraordinary crop of spaghetti. At the time, Italian pasta was an exotic delicacy in England and many people easily believed that spaghetti was simply grown on trees. People then continued to call the television for the next few days to see where they could get spaghetti tree seedlings.
You can watch the video documentary here.