PERUGIA, ITALY — I stood in a chocolate mosh pit, straining to hear the Italian spoken by a blond goddess yelling to be heard over the screams of hundreds of people fenced off around us. Frida Ciletti is a sculptor who was carving a 2,640-pound block of chocolate into what looked like a family crest on a yacht’s bow.
The wind carried the hypnotic, sweet aroma of a million chocolate shavings through my nostrils down my throat and into my heart, which always has had a spot reserved for the glories of mankind’s favorite food.
I just never bargained for 6,000 different chocolate products from 150 companies.
The 2,640-pounder? Oh, that was only a chocolate chip. You should’ve seen the Guinness World Record chocolate bar up the medieval street. That weighed in at 7,876 pounds and, at 13.2 square yards, if you gave it a sail it would look like a chocolate catamaran.
For all you choco junkies out there, next time you’re in Italy in October, an ideal time to visit, forget the ruins of Rome, the canals of Venice or the beaches of Amalfi. Your pilgrimage must be to Eurochocolate, Perugia’s annual nine-day chocolate bacchanal where 1 million people pour 50 million euro ($72.5 million) into the local economy.
In the grand tradition of ancient Rome, there is something truly chaotic, gluttonous and even sensual about Eurochocolate. Started in 1994 by Perugia native Eugenio Guarducci, inspired by Munich’s Oktoberfest beer festival, Eurochocolate is not for the casual chocolate teetotaler. Those feeling guilty about eating an M&M need not apply. This is for serious chocoholics, people who go to Enstrom’s and eat more free samples than they buy. It’s for people who wake up to eat chocolate, buck naked, at 4 a.m.
Who else could do what I did last week, fight 250,000 people filling Perugia’s narrow, cobblestoned Corso Vannucci to peruse the endless line of chocolate stands and many of their free samples? The masses around Ciletti’s chocolate sculpture were cardoned off like starving boat people. It transcended Italian society. Children. Elderly women. Construction workers. They were all screaming, “Qui! Qui! Qui!” (Here! Here! Here!) as aides bagged chocolate chunks scraped from the block and handed them to the seething crowd.
Eight centuries ago, Perugia was known for a similar type of hysteria. The Flagellants were known to physically whip themselves as a religious penance. I wondered if one of the Flagellants’ descendents was the Italian woman, with the features of a model and wardrobe off a Versace mannequin, screaming for chocolate as if she sought milk for her dying baby. But then, I was handed a piece the size of a sand dollar and it melted down my throat like nectar.
Yes, it was worth whipping yourself into a frenzy. Even the sculptor couldn’t resist eating it.
“Let’s just say lots!” she said. “A half kilo! And I have chocolate everywhere on me. In my pockets, everywhere.”
Yes, in Perugia, chocolate is everywhere. During my two days in Perugia, I saw chocolate pasta, chocolate-shaped Italian salami, chocolate brandy served in chocolate cups, chocolate barbecue sauce, chocolate vitamins, chocolate towers fake powered by chocolate batteries and Perugia’s medieval skyline carved into chocolate bricks.
I saw a man dressed like a giant white chocolate kiss and wondered if he ever hooked up later with the Italian woman handing out free abbracci (hugs). Down in the dark bowels of Rocca Paolina, Perugia’s 16th-century fortress, I saw chocolate bars from Brazil to Costa Rica to Nicaragua to Ghana.
One time I was led into a pitch-black room by a woman who told a group of us to smell, to touch, to taste, the three different pieces of chocolate we had no hopes of seeing in front of us. Like wine, Italy’s chocolate invades all the senses. When they turned on the lights, the women instructing us were blind.
Eurochocolate is educational like that. In one of the Rocca’s many cave-like grottos, I joined two dozen school children who surprisingly weren’t tearing up the insides of the castle like crazed beavers from mass insulin rush. They listened to a Eurochocolate World lecture that provides some good fun facts about chocolate.
Did you know Mayans stored chocolate in vases around modern-day Mexico, Belize and Guatemala in A.D. 465? How about the fact that 80 percent of the chocolate market is controlled by six multinational companies including Nestle (Switzerland), Cadbury (Great Britain), Ferrero (Italy) and Hershey (U.S.)?
They forgot one: European chocolate leaves American chocolate in the dust.
“American people don’t know the nice quality of European chocolates,” Guarducci said. “That would be a good mission – a festival of chocolate. Who doesn’t like chocolate?”
Staff writer John Henderson covers sports and writes about the food he eats on the road: jhenderson@denverpost.comor 303-954-1299.
