Proserpina was the daughter of the goddess of the harvest, Ceres. She became the goddess of the Underworld. In the account given by the Greek poet Ovid (43 BC – AD 18) in Metamorphoses, Prosperina went out picking cyclamens and snow-white lilies for her basket and her blouse in a luxuriant meadow by the ancient city of Enna. The city was situated where Castrogiovanni lies now, in the middle of Sicily, high up on a plateau, 900 metres above sea level. There, Pluto caught sight of Proserpina. He was straight away struck by one of Cupid’s arrows and fell in love. He immediately carried her off to his kingdom, the Underworld and the realm of the dead. However, Proserpina was allowed to come up from the Underworld for a few months each year, during which everything on earth blossomed again. The mythological figure of Proserpina unites the Underworld and earth’s spring, when the seeds germinate in the ground and everything grows and flowers. In Greek mythology, Persephone appears in the same guise as Proserpina in the Roman version.
