Eurochocolate Festival Food & Drink Event / Food Festival Every year in October

Every year since 1993, the high hilltop town of Perugia – located about 100 miles north or Rome – becomes a mountain of sugary sweetness thanks to the Eurochocolate Festival, one of the largest chocolate festivals in all of Europe.

Free-to-attend, the nine-day Eurochocolate Festival normally begins in mid-October, and routinely attracts more than one million visitors over the course of the event.

Perugia, by contrast, has less than 170,000 residents.

Most of the city’s squares are taken over by booths selling all the latest cocoa-based goodness one can imagine, with Italy’s famous Perugina brand well represented, as well as Lindt, Caffarel, and many boutique brands.

Visitors to the Eurochocolate Festival can engorge themselves on everything from chocolate-slathered bananas to heavy bricks of fudge (prices vary), or just make their way through the endless booths hunting for free samples (of which there are plenty!).

Ensuring your dentist hates you isn’t the only thing on offer during Eurochocolate, which also features street performances and chocolate sculpting, including the construction in recent years of an igloo comprised of nearly 8,000 pounds of…guess!

Eurochocolate Festival visitors can even grab a spot at the spa, where instead of specialty oil or mud masks, they can treat themselves to a scrumptious scrub of syrups.