Chocolate and sex at Perugina

They’re crazy about chocolate in Perugia. There’s a festival, in October, called Eurochocolate to celebrate what they call the “food of the gods.” There’s also the Chocolate Hotel where the restaurant has a Choco-Menu with everything being made of chocolate.

But the big chocolate draw is undoubtedly Perugina chocolate, the people that make those little blue foil-wrapped chocolate kisses.

Yesterday Maura took me out to the Perugina factory, a few minutes out of town, where we walked around the chocolate museum upstairs. She told me this story, which is probably apocryphal, about how the Baci chocolates came to be: Perugina chocolate was founded by two families named Buitoni and Spagnol. They made a little chocolate called cazzotto, which means punch or fist because that’s what it looked like. But they didn’t sell much chocolate.

The Chocolate Museum at Perugina.

The Chocolate Museum at Perugina.

 

 

Meanwhile, the wife of one of the founders, Luisa Spagnol, began having an affair with her husband’s business partner, Giovanni Buitoni. They worked together and every morning, Louisa would write a little love note and place it beneath a cappuccino on a plate with some chocolate and bring it to Giovanni. This gave him an idea and he decided to change the shape of the chocolate, call it Bacio, which means “kiss,” and put a love note in each one.

Then Maura held up the dark Bacio between her two fingers and asked me what I thought the chocolate looked like.

The answer was embarrassingly apparent: “A nipple?”

“Exactly,” she said. “Giovanni shaped the chocolate to look like his lover’s nipple.” Maura smiled, then plopped the dark mounded chocolate into my mouth.

She said, “Do you want another Bacio or have you had enough?”

I told her I could probably handle at least one more.

In the museum they had a lot of the old Perugina ads, some going back to the 30s, all emphasizing the sensual nature of chocolate. Even the original box, which came out in 1922, showed a representation of Goya’s famous “The Kiss” of Romeo and Juliette. A few years later, Perugina came out with a new product, a banana-flavored chocolate that was shaped like a two-inch-long banana. A poster made by the famed Italian artist Federico Seneca for the new product shows a recumbent black man, totally naked, cradling an immense banana between his legs.

“You know,” Maura said, studying the poster, “for us, chocolate and sex always go together.”

That night, before turning off the light, I sent a text message to Hardy: Weathr in Perugia gettng bettr; dn’t pay bet off just yet. 

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