A few miles from Pisa, in the tiny Tuscan hamlet of Cascina, is a small gourmet shop where gift boxes covered in cellophane line the shelves, customers scurry in to place orders and the sweet, delicate aroma of home cooking drifts in from the kitchen. The proprietor, Paul DeBondt, sets out a platter of bite-size pieces on the countertop for sampling and arranges rows and rows of artfully wrapped packages inside the display case. But you won’t find dusty bottles of Super-Tuscan, aging wheels of pecorino or pungent vats of olive oil. That’s because Mr. DeBondt makes only one thing — chocolate.
Since the 1980s, as the world bought pasta, wine, cheese and prosciutto by the freighter-full from Tuscany, a gastronomical tradition in chocolate has quietly swept through the region. Small factories devoted to shelling, grinding and melting cocoa beans have opened in the triangle from Florence to Pisa to Montecatini, giving rise to some of the purest chocolate in the world and the nickname Chocolate Valley.
“Tuscans are trained to talk about food, to taste food, study food,” Mr. DeBondt said. “I’m Dutch, and there’s no tradition of food in Holland. There’s only a tradition of boiled potatoes. I could never do this there.”
And until relatively recently, no one in Tuscany did chocolate. But what was once consigned as a precious treat at Christmas and Easter is now as commonplace as caffè macchiato. In the last decade, Italy’s annual chocolate consumption has doubled to nearly nine pounds a person, and last year, chocolate sales reached 350 million euros ($507.5 million at the current exchange rate of $1.45 to the euro).
