Perugia in 7 Bites: Eating in Italy

For our last activity in Perugia, we decided to take a food tour. It was run by an American woman living in Perugia, who was good, and the tour group was made up of us and about 7 Americans, including 4 who were friends of the tour guide, which was a bit weird to be honest. I mentioned this somewhere before on the blog, but one of them worked at Eately in New York and wouldn't stop comparing everything we were eating to which aisle it was sold on back in NYC.

But in general, the tour, which lasted 4 hours and took us to 7 locations to eat and drink around the city, plus a bit of sightseeing and history, was a fun way to spend the day.

Stop 1 - delicious thick hot chocolate (for me) and coffee (for everyone else) with pastries for breakfast

Stop 2 - cheese and proscuitto in an old cellar purportedly frequented by Perugino

Stop 3 - wine and olive oil tasting. It was surprising how grassy and peppery - and bright green - the olive oils were. We bought some at a discount

Stop 4 - truffles. Truffles aren't as bad as normal mushrooms, but that's about the best I can say about them. We went to eat truffle pasta AND to a truffle shop, which is entirely too much truffles if you ask me. The truffle shop, in particular, stank of them. But it was semi interesting hearing about how they find them. This box is apparently worth thousands

My generously-truffled pasta. It was... fine... but I really don't understand why anyone would pay top dollar for this. Tastes of nothing and the truffles scratched my throat on the way down

I evidently forgot to take a photo of our visit to the chocolate shop, where we tasted, amongst other things, balsamic vinegar-filled chocs, but you can't go to Perugia (home of the famous Baci chocolates) and not have chocolate so here's a bonus photo

This doesn't look like much, but it was my favourite treat of the tour. A warm "torta al testo", a local stuffed flatbread speciality filled with sausage and something green. Broccoli rabe? Kale? I forget

Last stop, gelato. Our guide assured us it was perfectly Italian to eat gelato twice a day

Some of the sights of the city we also saw on our walking tour:

Beam me up, Jesus

In the last post, I talked a little about the Rocca Paolina and the nice views from on top. We both completely missed that underneath is a maze of ancient and medieval squares and passageways. There is even an Etruscan gate. We would have completely missed it if not for the tour, duh. And we had the joy of one of our fellow tourists (one of those irritating "I'm Italian" American guys) asking the guide "is there some special symbolism in that sign?". It was one of these...