The small and secret chocolate shop in Perugia where the original Bacio can still be found, the lovers’ chocolate invented by Luisa Spagnoli, the lady of Italian haute couture

When Luisa Spagnoli he invented that Chocolate kiss that lovers exchange on Valentine’s Day, he wanted to call it a punch. The invention was accidental, a «Lucky Strike», the Americans would say, who have always been fascinated by strokes of luck capable of changing lives. In the chocolate workshop that Luisa and Annibale Spagnoli set up in Perugia, and which would later become Perugina, there was a small pile of leftover chopped hazelnuts, and quite a few loose hazelnuts, abandoned there. Luisa, who hated waste, began kneading those leftovers into a ball on which she placed a hazelnut, then covering everything with a pouring of dark chocolate.

«Looking at it carefully, that chocolate looked like a closed fist with the knuckle of the finger raised, ready to strike. A punch. But it was good, and a lot of it.” Telling the story of the Chocolate Kiss, but above all the story of a great woman and entrepreneur like Luisa Spagnoli, is Paola Jacobbi, who is currently being released in bookstores with «Luisa»a novel about the “first great Italian entrepreneur”.

«From his hands will be born the sweets and chocolates that have accompanied generations. Like the Kiss, which occupies a special place in Luisa’s heart because it seals her scandalous love with Giovanni Buitoni, fourteen years younger.” It was he who convinced her not to call it a punch, but a Kiss, because it sounded much better to ask one from a bar or pastry shop assistant. «Excuse me, can you give me a kiss?». And Luisa, who didn’t seem easy to compromise, was convinced. This in another life, the one lived by Luisa Spagnoli before transforming her rabbit farm into the Spagnoli Angora, delivering her name to the world of Italian high fashion.

Luisa Spagnoli’s chocolate shop in Perugia

Today, that story of chocolates and caring for good things still exists, and Luisa Spagnoli herself is carrying it forward over the years. Not the Luisa Spagnoli of the early twentieth century, but her great-granddaughter, who took her name and also her passion for chocolate from her.

«We were born among chocolate», says today’s Luisa. «At the Spagnoli house there have always been exceptional palates. My father Gianni, who was the technical director of the Perugina laboratory and kept all of my grandmother Luisa’s recipes, taught me how to make chocolate: one day he arrived in my kitchen with his old workers, the best ones: that’s where the adventure began of these chocolates.”

Thus was born the new «Spanish Confesserie du chocolat», a small country shop that seems to have come out of an old-time fairy tale. Here, in a pastel-colored laboratory, under the watchful gaze of a photo of grandmother Luisa, her chocolates are made, handmade one by one, exactly as she would have done.

«Here you can breathe the air of the Spagnoli home», says Luisa. «All products are made with the attention that has always characterized our family: care for the product, for the raw materials, for craftsmanship». The Kiss that Luisa Spagnoli creates today is exactly that of her grandmother. «Actually, a little better, because once upon a time they used more sugar, and we adjusted the recipe a little in that part». Instead of Bacio, it is called Nonna Luisa, but the shape is the same, with a touch of delicious irregularity that guarantees its artisanal workmanship. Then there is Stufisia, the banana flavored chocolatethe one we ate as children in a slightly Christmassy golden wrapper. There is the Pomona, renamed Giovanni after the father of today’s Luisa: «a chocolate that my grandmother liked so much, something for connoisseurs, very refined. It is an almond paste flavored with maraschino and candied fruit, glazed in dark chocolate. My grandmother had a giant one prepared, which she cut into slices and served during tea.” And then there are some new creations, but always in the name of the family past, such as the David Austin, “which reminds me of when dad tried to make a green kiss, with pistachio: it wasn’t successful but I loved it”.

In this little workshop, everything is done in Grandma Luisa’s name, in a way that – the youngest Luisa is sure – she would approve of. «I am very careful, because I feel the value and the emotional as well as entrepreneurial responsibility of all this», says Luisa. «We started by recreating what was created in 1901, and recovering products that are important to my family: it’s something I feel strongly about. And grandmother Luisa is always there, watching me. Every now and then, when we can’t keep up with orders and I go crazy, I turn to her and say, with affection, “What are you laughing at, grandmother?”