If you’ve ever delighted in the taste Italian chocolates wrapped with a little love note, it was probably ‘Baci’. After all these years, the chocolate’s recipe remains the same: dark chocolate, gianduia, chopped hazelnuts and crowned with a whole hazelnut.
Created in 1922 in Perugia, Italy by Luisa Spagnoli, a confectionary entrepreneur, Baci quickly became loved by everyone and claimed as the most romantic chocolate in Europe.
And it’s still proving to be so!
To celebrate this big mark, Dolce and Gabbana has collaborated with Perugina to create a celebration collection with a limited-edition recipe, which has a lemon-flavoured centre, coated with white chocolate.
What’s the love story behind the most romantic chocolate?
According to Perugina, which was sold to Nestle in 1988, Spagnoli set her sights on creating a new chocolate with a unique shape, which she thought looked like the knuckle of a clenched fist. At first she called it ‘Cazzotto’ (meaning ‘punch’ in Italian), to which her life companion, Giovanni Buitoni, thought the name was inappropriate. He proposed a more romantic name, and the chocolates were called ‘Baci’, meaning kisses.
This was the beginning of what was to become a fascinating story of one of the world’s best-known food-based romantic gestures. That being said – Baci’s famous love notes weren’t her idea, and the chocolates didn’t originally come with them. Few years after the birth of the Baci, Federico Seneca, Perugina’s art director at the time, decided to include something unique in the wrapping paper the chocolate had become famous for.
Spagnoli not only invented Baci, but also went on to create her own fashion house bearing her name and one of the big names in Italian fashion.
“It was already strange to find a woman sitting on the board of a company let alone finding one who looked after the innovative aspects, the recipes, the products, the activity concerning the products, but she was an ingenious entrepreneur with a very modern spirit.”
Carolina São Marcos
