Florence, Italy: Riding the Sugar High

I just returned from the world’s largest chocolate festival. Eurochocolate, http://www.eurochocolate.com, is an annual fair devoted entirely to chocolate. It was packed! This year in the ten days it’s hosted in Perugia (in Umbria to the south of Florence), they’re expecting over a million people. In fact, the bus I went on couldn’t get into the city; we had to park a town over and then ride the train into the city. From there, everything in the city was setup for the festival. The busses were only running the “ciacco line”. The police were linking their arms and forming lines to channel the herding pedestrian traffic. The only nice thing about being so crowded? There aren’t many 6’3″ Italians who go to chocolate festivals.

There are a lot of free giveaways (like chocolate cookies and Coca-cola Light), but most of the chocolate is for sale. While the displays on fair-trade cocoa and the new types of pepper-chocolate were interesting, the tasting was the best. There were chocolates made without butter or sugar that tasted so smooth. There were dark chocolates that you couldn’t bite through – you had to suck on them. They had almost anything you can imagine with chocolate. One lady had long hair and had it styled with chocolate (that was actually kind of disgusting since it had started melting mid-day).

I came home with some fun stuff too: coffee beans covered with white chocolate; a bar of dark chocolate with mint crystals in it; a white chocolate bar with some types of nuts and toffees inside; a giant bottle of chocolate liqueur; a bottle of chocolate pepper vodka (yeah, I know, they have EVERYTHING with chocolate in it); a box of wafer cookies filled with dark chocolate; a bar of dark Cuban chocolate; and my personal favorite — two bars of pepper-chocolate. The pepper-chocolate burns on the way down but is kind of fun since the taste stays in your mouth and throat for a while.

After the first twenty minutes of walking around I was already tired of the chocolate. I’d tasted so much so fast that the rest of the time was scoping out what to stock for the rest of the semester (and whatever survives long enough to make it home). The sugar (and caffeine) high lasted me well into the afternoon. Here are three things I’d definitely recommend before going to a chocolate festival: 1) don’t bother with breakfast before going, 2) take a water bottle — washing chocolate down with hot chocolate is counter-productive, and 3) pack something salty for lunch so you don’t wait in line for a prosciutto sandwich. My afternoon snack that was a little salty: popcorn with chocolate instead of butter. It was nice, but it simply lifted the sugar high back to where it’d been before.

You don’t have to go to Belgium or the middle of the Swiss Alps to get great food and great chocolate. Italy once again proved that you don’t have to go far away to experience something completely different.