Eurochocolate 2007: The Era of Chocolate

Perugia’s famous chocolate festival, Eurochocolate, is going on this week in the capital of Umbria. The fun got started on Saturday, when a giant PlayStation 3 game console – entirely made of chocolate – was unveiled, and then 200 smaller chocolate PlayStation 3 controllers were broken up and dispersed through the crowd for consumption.

This is the 14th year of Eurochocolate, which takes over the town of Perugia and gives the very air the scent of cocoa. The program changes each year, and this year includes musical acts, discussions about some different culinary uses for chocolate, and even a segment about using chocolate in your beauty regimen. Unfortunately, I think they’re referring to applying chocolate directly to the skin, not eating it. This year happens to be the 100th anniversary of Perugina, the city’s chocolate maker and the original force behind the festival, so that adds a special celebratory element to the goings-on.

The theme for the 2007 Eurochocolate festival is ChocolAge: L’Era del Cioccolato (The Era of Chocolate), and the idea is to inject chocolate into everyday life in such a way that it doesn’t seem strange or noteworthy anymore. Toward this end, one of the promotional pictures they’re using is of a woman talking not into her cell phone, but into a bar of chocolate. And yet all I can think is, “Wow, if that melts, that’s going to be a pain to get out of her hair…”

The fun runs through this Sunday, October 21st.

Check out some images of last year’s festival here, a video from Eurochocolate past, and if you’re anywhere near Perugia this week you can find out more about getting in on some of this year’s action before it ends here. (Be warned, the website seems only to be in Italian, despite the little British flag you’ll see and click on. The URL changes, but the language does not. Give ’em a break, these people are working with chocolate – which, arguably, is far more important than website translation.)