Saturday a friend and I headed for one of the most sacred chocolate-lovers’ events in Europe… Eurochocolate. The festival is held annually for all chocolate lovers and we hopped on a 2.5 hour train ride, destination: Perugia, to partake. When we arrived in Perugia, there wasn’t really any signage as to where the chocolate festival would be taking place, so we headed for old town– on foot. Now there is a chocolate festival train as well as a bus system but we (optimistically) decided to save the few euro and use our own form of transport– our feet. Forty-five minutes later of uphill climbing, we might have been regretting that decision a little bit! But the amount of walking we did definitely paid off throughout the day as we were able to gobble down lots of tasty treats and not feel like we were going to be ill.
We started with traditional Italian hot chocolate, for just over one euro. Real Italian hot chocolate is more similar to pudding than American hot chocolate– it’s very thick! But tasty, mmm.
We ate and we ate and we ate and ate and ate… Well, I’ll just let the photos do the talking!
Everything was SO delicious! The sambuca hot chocolate had been recommended to us and was very tasty, and we just had to try everything… even the chocolate beer, which was really just like weak beer and not much like chocolate at all. The least favorite of all the things we had during the day. I really enjoyed the lemon vodka chocolates… nice kick and so refreshing! Perugia itself was lovely, the views from the hill were true Tuscan panoramics. We had such a nice time just strolling around the village and even getting to explore the subterranean tunnels that a prior pope had constructed where some of the booths had set up shop.
By the end of the day we were ready for some crowd-free spaces, so we headed back to the train station. The festival was so impressive- it was massive! Every time we thought we had seen the entire festival we turned a corner and there were more white tents beckoning us to try something new!.There were a few repeating booths with the same merchandise but overall a ton of unique products were available to try. We headed back on the train and were both glad to return to Florence, but we did bring home a few tasty treats as reminders for the week ahead!