Italy’s Easter treats

 

If you give up sweets for Lent, you’re in big trouble here. About a month before Easter, beautifully wrapped dove-shaped cakes and amazing chocolate eggs start popping up everywhere.

 

The cake – called Colomba di Pasqua (Dove of Easter) – is a traditional Easter dessert, with many variations throughout the country. It’s typically a sweet yeast bread made with eggs and candied fruit peel, similar to panettone, and topped with sugar and almonds or chocolate…

But if it’s chocolate you crave, there’s nothing quite like Italian Easter eggs. You get a sugar rush just looking at them.

 

 

 

 

They’re the size of footballs – or bigger – with toys and trinkets inside. Some are custom-made and artfully decorated, encasing luxurious trinkets like engagement rings and car keys.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I set out this week on my own egg hunt in Florence and found this “SUPER UOVO,” which was raffled off at a cafe-bar. >>>

What about real eggs, you might ask. The kind that chickens lay and that you lower into cups of artificial dye with wire holders at Easter time.

It used to be that Easter eggs in Italy were colored red (using natural food coloring) to signify the blood of Christ. I’ve read accounts of grandma getting the eggs blessed by the priest on the Saturday before Easter. During Lent, eggs were a forbidden food which made them a welcomed treat on Easter Day.

I’m told that coloring eggs is not common here anymore. So it was fun watching children at a recent Easter party hosted by the Florence Children’s Lending Library, where dying eggs (with kits from the U.S.) was a big hit.

These two Italian boys quickly adapted to this foreign custom and decided to make green dinosaur eggs…

 

 

 

 

 

 

…with green hands to match.

 

HAPPY EASTER ~ BUONA PASQUA!