According to some studies, a regular dose of chocolate can be as good for your health as an active sex life. And at the annual Eurochocolate Festival in Perugia, Italy, the two aren't regarded as mutually exclusive.
Well, that might be overstating it a bit. But when vendors from across the world offer — among their other, more sweetly innocent goods — chocolate condoms, Kama Sutra chocolate blocks and chocolate nipple spread (complete with spatula), you can't help but wonder if the best solution to what ails you is simply to double up your vices and plan to live to a ripe old age.
If last year's event — which drew 150 merchants and more than a million visitors — is any indication, the 13th annual Eurochocolate Festival, running from Oct. 14 to 22, will certainly be a gustatory orgy of all things cocoa. Even better, it will unfold in one of Umbria's most charming cities, a 735-year-old medieval redoubt whose ancient walls continue to afford impressive views over the Tiber Valley.
It's here that the painter Pietro Vannucci, whose students included Raphael, created many of his luminous landscapes and life-like Madonnas, many of which are housed in Perugia's National Gallery of Umbria. It's here that the Baci chocolate factory has made its trademark “kisses,” each wrapped in a little love poem, for nearly 80 years.
And it is here each fall, in and around the main street of Corso Vannucci (itself included in the book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die), in long rows of turreted, cotton tents, that the world's chocolatiers strut their tempting stuff. In the process, they transform the Umbrian capital, as Eurochocolate's website so poetically puts it, into “a huge open-air pastry shop for the delight of all the greedy persons and the slaves of cacao.”
And, of course, it's not all about chocolate and sex.
Some of it, for instance, is about chocolate and liquor. Strolling the booths on a sunny afternoon last October, it was hard work not getting tipsy on the way to a chocolate high. At the booth of Peccatucci di Mamma Andrea, from the island of Sicily, chocolate liqueur ($28 for 750 millilitres) beckoned with a promise of 23-per-cent alcohol and a taste that the trio of women selling it described as “dolce, dolce.”
We bought a bottle and poured a velvety ounce (or two) into take-out lattes while sitting on the Piazza 4 Novembre at the top of Corso Vannucci, sipping away while taking in the view of the bronze-topped Fontana Maggiore, or Great Fountain, carved with bas-reliefs of scenes from Aesop's Fables.
A few stalls down, Il Cioccolato di BruCo, a company based in Jesi, on Italy's Adriatic Coast, sold chocolate bricks the size of a pack of cards, and infused with anisette, rum or tequila. For $3.50, I bought the tequila version, which gave me only a minor buzz (no doubt mostly from the chocolate) but certainly tasted unique — kind of like a chocolate margarita with no need for a glass. Down the way, at the booth of Italiani Liquori, chocolate grappa promised to be bracing, but seemed a little too weird to merit a bottle for the road.
An equally odd item at one nearby booth was tagliatelle al cacao: fettucini-like ribbons of pasta made with flour and chocolate. Presumably it would have been perfectly complemented with a serving of the Gorgonzola chocolate cheese we saw at several stalls, priced about the same as regular Gorgonzola but shot through with both blue and brown veins.
