Chocolate, exquisite gentleness

Summary

- Money on a tree
- Vice vs. virtue
- A State affair
- Granduca of Tuscany's jasmine chocolate
- A scientific evidence
- Chocolate on a pentagram

From March, 5th, till April, 10th, 2005, the Central National Library of Florence, the main book institution in Italy, guests a great exhibition dedicated to the food of the gods: chocolate.
Through thousands of documents, manuscripts and rare books of the past, the curators of the exhibition created a path to the discovery of the chocolate's universe, starting from the origins in Mexico, to the great and controversial diffusion it had in Tuscany in the court of the Medici.



Money on a tree
The merit of the introduction of chocolate in Italy, or at least of its knowledge, goes to the Florentine Francesco d'Antonio Carletti, who visited in 1591 "the whole East and West Indies" and came back to Florence in 1606 affirming that cocoa is such a famous and important fruit that is also used as money. However, yet the Milanese chronicler Pietro Martire d'Anghiera talked in his "De Orbe Novo", published in Paris in 1587, about cocoa seeds, used as money "that grows on a tree", while Girolamo Benzoni in the "Historia del mondo nuovo" (1565) had already talked about chocolate as a sour, piquant beverage, "good for pigs and not for men". He referred to the beverage sacred to the Maya and the Aztecs, made with cocoa and maize seeds pounded in the mortar: there was still a long time to come to the delicate and sweet beverage that seduced the whole Europe in the XVII Century.

Vice vs. virtue
As said, chocolate came to Italy in the early XVII Century, and it had the fortune to find in Cosimo I and Francesco I de' Medici two great lovers of any novelty coming from the exotic world of the Indies: tea, coffee and "cioccolatte" found the favour of the richest nobility. The cultural competition with Spain, together with the renowned love of many members of the Medici dynasty for conviviality, brought them to be the first to have their own cocoa dough and to set apposite workshops to develop new recipes. As a result of this devotion to a sort of "professional pleasure", the Medici developed their recipe of a chocolate flavoured with jasmine, which become a "must" everywhere in Europe.
The debate around the "chocolatl", as Maya and Aztecs called it, was so large that it became a central matter of writings and discussions among literates. The most debated points were those concerning its controversial relation with health and with the rules of catholic fasting. This debate on chocolate's "vices and virtues" deeply involved both laics and religious, leading to a split between "cioccolatieri", defending it, and "anticioccolatisti", defaming it. The former talked of quite an angelic elixir, the latter of a diabolic liqueur. A central figure among these was surely Francesco Redi, literate at the court of the Medici, whose ideas were taken in the highest consideration by all the Western world. In his "Bacchus in Tuscany", first published in 1685 and quickly celebrated everywhere, Redi extolled the greatness of wine, tea, chocolate and coffee with very inspired verses. The taste for exotic beverages became very popular, also because it perfectly coupled the baroque ideology.

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