Sweets

Italians seem to love fruit flavored hard candies and we saw small boxes of Leone Pastilles displayed at nearly every  checkout counter.   Although the boxes are pretty, I'm not a fan of the candy inside.

Instead, I shopped for the other Italian passion:  licorice.  No Twizzlers or Red Vines:  Italians like black licorice and produce it in an amazing variety from tiny pellets to small discs, plain or candy coated.  There was an incredible selection at Castroni on the Via Nationale across from the Pallazo delle Esponsizioni, where I found these tins.  The blue Sassolini tin had large candy coated nuggets, like marble stones.  The white Bianconeri tin contains small licorice mints.  The red Amarelli tin contained plain black licorice so bitter that we threw it out.  They also had candies in bulk.

There are so many beautiful pastries and cakes in Italy that you wonder how the Italians stay so thin.  In Sienna, we bought these dense, decadent cakes loaded with dried fruits and chocolate.    Inside the shiny paper wrapping each sugar dusted cake is vacuum sealed in a foil pouch.  Yum.

Finally, on the way home, we hit the duty free store at Heathrow for jumbo sized assortments of our favorite chocolates:  Cadbury (English), Lindt (Swiss) and Kinder(German).  If there is Italian chocolate, we didn't find any.  But there is an incredible Lindt store in Florence, right across from the Duomo.