Two of My Favorite Things: Ceramics and Chocolate!

Yesterday we drove to Deruta, the ceramics mecca of Italy. There must be several hundred shops and galleries there, and it's hard to know where to start looking. I had read about a few new ones that I wanted to investigate, but we ended up back at our favorite, Ubaldo Grazia. The quality is excellent, and you can actually see the people hand painting the items. The owner's family has been in this business for centuries, and while he is becoming more frail, his daughter is involved in the business and will probably take over soon.

We decided to also look at the center of town which, of course, is high on a hill and required struggling up hundreds of steps. The beauty of traveling to towns like this in March is that there are NO tourists here now. We will see a huge difference next week when we go to Florence, but for now it is kind of nice to be the only ones walking through a village like this one. We had the chance to watch several of the artists painting the pieces - such tiny strokes - I don't know how they do it. And like all these little towns, they have their cats.

It's as if this ceramic bowl was made for this cat and placed in a sunny window.

Next on our agenda for the day was a tour of the Perugina factory where they make wonderful chocolates including their famous chocolate kisses (not at all like Hershey)! We smelled the factory before we saw it. We had reserved a tour in English and arrived, paid a small fee, and met up with our guide and the other two people on the tour. This is when they told us the factory was closed for repairs and we couldn't tour it! Oh no! Was this like the pizzeria that didn't serve pizza?

Fortunately, the guide had arranged a different activity for us. They have a Chocolate School where people can come to learn how to make chocolate candy. The Chef/Instructor was going to show us how they do it. So basically we saw the process that is done in the factory, but we saw it up close. Even better! The Chef only spoke Italian so our guide translated most of it, but it was just fun to watch him play with chocolate.

At the end of his lesson, we had to taste the results - dark chocolate filled with a coffee cream and dark chocolate filled with a pistachio cream. Both great! Our guide gave us a tour of their museum and explained the history of the company which included a scandalous affair between one of the founder's wife and the other founder. And we also learned that this family company was purchased by Nestle in the 80s. So I'm sure some of the Perugina line can be purchased in the States.

The final part of the tour was the tasting room. Here's the spread put out for us.

Dark chocolate on the left and the wrapped kisses on the right.

Even some milk chocolate! (This is for you, BG)

Did I mention that there were just 4 of us on the tour?? And that we had already had several samples back in the Chocolate School? We did our best to try a few different ones, and then when she said we could take them with us..... well, we snatched up quite a few of the wrapped kisses and there will hopefully be some left for a few of you when we get home. Maybe. No promises.