L'Uovo di Pasqua: A Story of Five Centuries of Chocolate, Ceremony, and Hidden Surprises

Long before anyone thought to wrap an egg in chocolate, the egg itself was already ancient and holy.

The Romans had a saying: omne vivum ex ovo, meaning all life comes from the egg. In their era, they buried red-painted eggs in freshly sown fields as a blessing for a good harvest.

The Egyptians, at an earlier time, saw the egg as the fulcrum of the four elements (air, water, earth, and fire) and believed it was the seed from which the universe was born.

Later, across the ancient Mediterranean, from Persia to Mesopotamia, painted eggs were exchanged at the spring equinox as tokens of rebirth after winter's long dormancy.

How Christianity Inherited the Egg

When Christianity spread through Europe, it folded this older symbolism into its history. The egg, hard and sealed like a stone tomb, held life within, and so it became a natural emblem of the Resurrection. By the Middle Ages, gifting eggs at Easter had become established across Europe.

In Germany, common folk boiled eggs and wrapped them in leaves and flower petals to absorb natural dyes. Among the aristocracy, a more extravagant tradition emerged; they commissioned eggs of silver, gold, and precious stones.

From Folk Tradition to Imperial Jewel

This courtly tradition reached its apex in nineteenth-century Russia. Tsar Alexander III commissioned Peter Carl Fabergé to create bejewelled masterpieces for the Tsarina: ornate eggs that opened to reveal miniature golden crowns, jewelled flowers, and golden chicks inside.

Fabergé would go on to produce fifty-two imperial eggs before the Bolshevik
Revolution ended his life's work forever.

But Italy's own path with the Easter egg would take a different, more delicious turn. To understand how, you have to understand what was happening in a particular city in the foothills of the
Alps.

The story of chocolate in Italy begins, as so many Italian stories do, with a duke, a debt of gratitude, and a royal court.

In 1559, Emanuele Filiberto, Duke of Savoy, served as a general in the army of the King of Spain. Spain was, at that time, the only European power importing cacao beans from its New World colonies. As thanks for his military service, the Spanish crown presented the Duke with a sack of these strange, bitter beans. In the following year, Emanuele Filiberto moved the Savoy capital from Chambéry to Turin.

He celebrated by serving hot chocolate to his court. It was a dark, spiced, exotic drink that nothing in European cuisine had prepared anyone for.

How Turin Became a Chocolate City

The court went wild for it. Critically, the House of Savoy did something that shaped Italian confectionery for the next four centuries: they kept taxes on cacao and sugar low. This made chocolate accessible not just to royalty but eventually to the general public.

In 1678, the Savoy court granted the first official license for chocolate production in Turin. They permitted a chocolatier named Gio' Antonio Ari to open the city's first cioccolateria: a shop dedicated entirely to hot chocolate.

The Invention of the Chocolate Bar

Turin never looked back. By the early eighteenth century, the city's chocolatiers were experimenting relentlessly. They developed techniques to mix cacao with vanilla, water, and sugar into a malleable paste.

Around 1778, an inventor named Doret built a machine that blended cocoa butter with vanilla and sugar. This produced something new: solid, edible chocolate.

Turin had effectively invented the chocolate bar.

Napoleon's Blockade and a Happy Accident

As production in Turin flourished, the city's chocolatiers continually pushed boundaries. Then, with Napoleon's arrival, came a surprising influence that would catalyse one of the most brilliant innovations in confectionery history.

When Napoleon's Continental System blockaded British ships in European ports starting in 1806, the supply of cacao to Italy was cut off. Chocolate became scarce and ruinously expensive. The chocolatiers of Piedmont, resourceful and stubborn, looked to the hills around them for a solution. The Langhe hills south of Turin were blanketed with hazelnut orchards, producing a prized variety called the Tonda Gentile ("gracious round"), prized for its sweetness and delicate flavour.

By blending roasted, ground hazelnuts into their dwindling chocolate supply, the Piedmontese chocolate makers stretched their precious cacao and, in doing so, accidentally created something extraordinary.

The Birth of Gianduia

They called it gianduia, after Gianduja, the jovial, wine-loving carnival maschera who is the folk symbol of Turin. The first product to bear his name was the gianduiotto, a small, creamy, boat-shaped chocolate that debuted at the 1865 Turin Carnival, handed out in the streets by a man in Gianduja's three-cornered hat and brown jacket. It was the world's first individually wrapped chocolate. Caffarel, the company that produced it, still makes gianduiotti today.

It was in this same city, already the chocolate capital of Italy, that the Easter egg was about to be transformed forever.

The leap from decorated real eggs to chocolate Easter eggs
happened in stages, and Turin was at the centre of each one.

According to the historical research of Mario Marsero, chronicler of Piedmontese confectionery, the earliest known attempt to make a chocolate Easter egg occurred in Turin in 1725.

A lady called Signora Giambone ran a shop on Via Roma, and she began carefully filling the emptied shells of real chicken eggs with melted chocolate. The work was painstaking and delicate. Each shell had to be drained, cleaned, and filled by hand without cracking. The results were lovely but rare, limited by the fragility of the process.

Meanwhile, during the same period, across the Alps, Louis XIV of France reportedly asked his court chocolatier to fashion an egg from cocoa paste; one account credits the Sun King with commissioning the first true chocolate egg, though it seems to have been a one-off royal novelty rather than a lasting tradition.

What Stood in the Way?

The real barrier was technological. Chocolate in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was coarse and crumbly, and difficult to mould into thin, hollow shapes.

The breakthrough came in 1828, when the Dutch chemist Coenraad van Houten invented the cocoa press. This device separated cocoa butter from cocoa solids. For the first time, it was possible to produce smooth, pliable chocolate that could be poured into moulds.

Solid chocolate eggs began appearing in France and Germany in the early nineteenth century. But they were exactly that: solid, heavy, and expensive. In Britain, J.S. Fry & Sons produced the first commercially available hollow chocolate egg in 1873, followed by Cadbury two years later. But these were still crude by later standards: each mould had to be lined by hand with paste chocolate, one at a time.

The Machine That Changed Everything

It was back in Turin, in the 1920s, that the modern chocolate Easter egg was truly born.

A company called Casa Sartorio patented a revolutionary system. Hinged moulds were placed inside a machine that subjected them to simultaneous rotation and revolution. This caused the liquid chocolate to spread evenly over the entire inner surface of the mould. When it cooled, you had a perfectly smooth, thin, hollow shell — light, elegant, and satisfying to crack open. Marsero documented this in his 1926 publication, which described the process. The chocolate was placed in spring-release tins and, through the machine's rotation, shaped into a flawless egg.

Almost immediately, someone had the idea to put something inside.

The first surprises placed inside Sartorio's hollow eggs, around 1925, were modest: little animals made of sugar paste, or a handful of sugared almonds. Still, the idea was irresistible. People loved cracking open a beautiful chocolate shell to discover something hidden inside.

The sorpresa quickly became the defining feature of the Italian Easter egg.

The Surprise Travels South

By 1927, elaborate chocolate Easter eggs were fashionable throughout Turin, and the tradition was travelling south. It took hold differently in different places: in the cities, pasticcerias began competing on the quality and ingenuity of what they concealed inside; in smaller towns, the egg became a vehicle for more personal gestures — a keepsake, a token, something chosen with care for a particular person.

The sorpresa was always chosen with care.

From Luxury to National Ritual

The post-war economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s transformed the egg from artisan luxury into a national ritual. Industrial production made chocolate eggs affordable for ordinary families, and the sorpresa became a reliable fixture of Easter morning across Italy, something children
anticipated for weeks and adults engineered with quiet satisfaction.

What the Sartorio mould had made technically possible, the sorpresa had made emotionally indispensable.

Walk into any Italian town in the weeks before Easter, and you will see them everywhere.

In the smallest village, the windows of bakeries and alimentari are stacked high with uova di Pasqua: chocolate Easter eggs sheathed in every imaginable colour, crowned with elaborate bows and trailing ribbons. Sizes run from modest treats that fit in a child's hand to towering monuments of chocolate that require both arms to carry. The mass-produced versions, from brands like Perugina and Kinder, are ubiquitous and affordable.

But the artisan tradition that began in Turin remains vigorously alive.

The Artisan Tradition

Italy's finest chocolatiers, among them Guido Gobino in Turin, Amedei in Tuscany, and the storied houses of Caffarel, Baratti & Milano, and Peyrano, produce Easter eggs that are edible works of art, made with single-origin cacao, hand-decorated with coloured chocolate and royal icing, wrapped with the care of a jeweller presenting a ring.

Some pasticcerias will let customers bring their own surprise to be sealed inside: a piece of jewellery, a love letter, even a set of house keys. Proposals via a chocolate egg are not unheard of.

La sorpresa remains sacred.

And so continues a tradition that started with a Duke, a sack of beans, and a cup of hot chocolate nearly five centuries ago.

BACK TO MY EGG →