browsing over at the lovesicily blog, i was reminded that coming up soon is the perugina eurochocolate festival in italy, which takes place every year in the lovely umbrian town of perugia. aka chocolate capital of the world. i mean, screw hershey, pa. this town knows its shit. you think you know chocolate? you've tasted nothing until you've had a baci, a chocolate-hazlenut combination of fantasticness, and probably my favorite chocolate of all time. and they're fun - every baci is enfolded in a sliver of paper containing a quote about love, like a little chocolate fortune cookie for the romantically inclined. i once read that the original producer of baci wrapped his hand-made chocolates in love notes and passed them on to the woman he was having an affair with, who was a master chocolate maker in her own right. is this how chocolate originated as a lover's gift? do i care as long as tommy keeps buying me chocolate? not really.

i was lucky enough to attend the eurochocolate festival in october 2002 - it was actually one of my first substantial weekend trips in italy, and we had an amazing time. a few pictures of the town are here. unfortunately, i was so obsessed with taking pictures of the gorgeous architecture and landscape that i didn't get a ton of good shots regarding the chocolate stuff. like the nutella crepes we had every morning for breakfast, or the 1euro cups of sicilian hot chocolate that were as thick as pudding, or the samples of every kind of chocolate imaginable that vendors were literally throwing at us.

two things we came across were especially ridiculous/awesome. one was the apparently famed sculpting of the chocolate, where a few sculptors are set up on platforms in the town square with chocolate blocks weighing, oh, a ton or two. we actually had to leave perugia to catch our train back to milan before we were able to see what they ended up sculpting, but the memorable part was standing in the rabid crowd, fighting for bags of slivers of chocolate that the sculptors' assistants tied up and threw, laughing, into the crowd. laughing because they knew that old women would beat children, middle-aged men would beat old women, and young american women would step on middle-aged mens' feet all in an attempt to grab a bag. goddammit, i don't care if i gave that dude a black eye. it was worth it.

anyway, the stranger event was something we stumbled on in our walks around the town. as we were considering purchasing some wool scarves from a street vendor, robin noticed an archway across the street that had a large crowd gathering around it. as it seemed to be open to the public, we made our way into the dimly lit room. and it was freaky.

it was sort of like a scene straight out of a fellini movie – that is, if fellini had ever directed a movie about a rather terrifying spa where the main beauty merchandise is chocolate. there were beautiful italian women in somber black lab coats and thick-framed glasses who stood in the corners, holding trays with glass vials of chocolate resting upon them. to the left was a long glass counter containing rows and rows of mysterious bottles that, upon closer inspection, were labeled with names like Chocolate Lotion Super Dream and Invigorating Chocolate Facial Mask. yummy.

shirtless men lounged around in terrycloth towels, their hair and faces smeared with chocolate. over in the next room, an attendant was giving people chocolate hair washes, which is just as bizarre as it sounds. they would rub a mass of liquidated chocolate into someone's hair, sculpt it into an intricate design, and tell them to leave it on for an hour or two, after which point they would wash it out and the hair was supposed to be shiny and invigorated, or some such bull shit.

we got some standard jargon from one of the attendants about how chocolate is actually good for your skin. this is not so strange upon reflection, as you've got the cocoa butter that's used in chocolate. but then why don't you just use, you know, regular cocoa butter? instead of creating an enormous nasty chocolate mess? they blathered on about antioxidants, but i wasn't really buying it. however, they were so incredibly and italian-y persistent that i bought a bar of cocoa soap just to get the hell out of there.

i left perugia thinking that the italians have got some serious chocolate fetishes. but browsing around the internet today to try to get some actual factual information on why you might want to dip your head into a vat of chocolate, i came across what can only be described as an abomination of nature: the chocolate spa at hershey hotel in hershey, pa.

for the bargain price of hundreds of dollars, you too can receive such treatments as the whipped cocoa bath, chocolate hydrotherapy (where "Adding the essence of cocoa is sure to conjure up thoughts of childhood during this hydrotherapy experience"), and the chocolate bean polish, where you can have your skin exfoliated (aka scraped off your bones) with crushed walnut shells.

now i'm much more skeptical of any good coming from a hershey chocolate treatment as opposed to an italian chocolate treatment, because, as we all know, hersheys chocolate is to italian chocolate as a pile of steaming dog crap is to gold, as is much stuff in the american culinary realm to its counterparts in the italian culinary realm. but still. i'm almost tempted to break open that bar of cocoa soap i bought in perugia two years ago. except, like totally not. instead i'm going to go home and eat 32 of the chocolate cupcakes i made last night, and pray that someone will send me some bacis.