Parle Inglese?!: Warning: Food Nerdery Ahead

Anyone who has known me for any length of time will be able to tell you thing. Firstly, that I love food, and that love is second only to cats (speaking of cats, no one seems to be a cat person in Florence. All I see are dogs. And I like dogs of course, but they are undeniably not cats).

But back to my main point.

I love food so much, it was one my deciding factors in choosing to study abroad in Italy in the first place. With the exception of France, no other country has the culinary reputation that Italy possesses. I could rhapsodize on about the wonders of food for days, but for now, I’m just going to focus on the one delicacy that is hands down my favourite thing to eat ever.

Chocolate. Cioccolato, as it is known here.

This being said, imagine my absolute shock and awe when exploring I found a chocolate festival right in the piazza of my neighbourhood! It was the best thing that happened here yet. And here I was worried that I would miss out on my plethora of Valentine’s Day treats.

While I know most of you probably would not go "ZOMG!!!!!" when you stumble upon a chocolate festival, I hope you enjoy the pictures anyway of my idea of paradise!

The church in the piazza Santa Santa Croce (Santa Croce is the section of the city I live in). This was where the festivities took place.

Sarah made us an approximation of this for Christmas! Except hers looked better, and I best it tasted better to. This was going for 6.50 euro apiece. There is a market waiting for her to conquer.

CHOCOLATE VOLTAIRES!!!!

White chocolate with rice. Delicious, and I'm not even a huge fan of white chocolate.

I was unreasonabley excited to find cats, even if they were made of chocolate.

I can only assume this is how they get kids to drink milk here. Obviously David drank this and that is why he is so awesome.

Candied clementine dipped in dark chocolate. They had almost every candied fruit imaginable covered in chocolate there; orange, pineapple, lime, lemon, cherry, papaya, kiwi. I also found a stand where the gentleman made milk chocolate infused with fruit flavouring, which was also interesting. I tried the peach one, and the flavours complemented each other surprisingly well.

This says 'frutto do cacao'. They're actual cacao beans, imported from Spain I think?

This was a dark chocolate square filled with red wine and a dried grape. The picture doesn't do it justice, but it was delicious. The Italians (and Europe in general. There were a lot of international vendors there) love mixing chocolate with alcohol. I had some chocolate infused with rum there and it was divine.

Candied oranges in dark chocolate.

They're fond of white chocolate pistachio truffles here. I've never tried pistachio with white chocolate, but now I'm intrigued.

Hot chocolate. Except Italian hot chocolate is NOTHING like American hot chocolate. It's more like straight up melted chocolate... Think fudge consistency, without the overwhelming high fructose corn syrup sweetness. Absolutely amazing.