Chocolate Festival

If you were in Rome for the last two weeks, you had the opportunity to attend two different chocolate festivals! These are definitely fantastic to go to when in Rome because it is one of the many FREE THINGS TO DO IN ROME! (if you can hold back from buying something)

My expert and I decided to visit the one in central Rome, located in a popular and touristy neighborhood called Trastevere.

Though we were immediately disappointed to find that there were only about 9 total vendors making this one of the smallest festivals we have ever been to, we were still happy to be out in Rome and seeing what the world had to offer us.

Especially when the world offers us chocolate.

I was impressed with all the creations of the skilled vendors.

So were all the bees as you could tell from the first photo.

 The bees particularly enjoyed cheese- and salami-shaped chocolate.

 So delicious looking.

 Below almost made the first photo for the post!  So many varieties!

 Creative pops.  Lions and monkeys and dogs, oh my.

 Truffles looked amazing! Kind of wish I'd tasted one.  There's always next year!

 And then the fruit filled "bark"looked wonderful.

 I probably would have gone for banana chocolate first if it were up to me.

 Nut barks were also common.

It wasn’t all chocolate either.  It really should have been called Dolce Festival because about 70% of the offerings were devoted to chocolate and 30% were devoted to non-chocolate sweets such as donuts, pastries, cookies, and cannoli.

 The marrons glace were also a favorite of the bees.  how many do you count in the photo?

 Sicilian cookies looked sooooo good.

 Donut master.

 The vendor clapping his hands actually became more annoying than amusing.

We thought the icing on the donut was going to be a strawberry flavor.  Turned out to be pink colored white chocolate.  Guess what?  I still ate it.

 Definitely no chocolate in this cannoli.  But who can pass up a fresh cannoli?

All in all, it may have been a small festival but it was still a wonderful experience.  Chocolate eating is easily considered a fun thing to do and if you are in fact ANYWHERE in the world and hear about a chocolate festival near you, take the opportunity to get out of the house and enjoy the sights, smells and tastes.