Sweet Easter Pasqua in Italy

The Italian way of saying “Christmas with yours, Easter with whom you want” allows many to organize freely for Easter, go on a trip or just take a field trip “fuori porta”, a picnic with friends.

If we still want to celebrate Easter with the family, there is always Easter Monday, forever dedicated to a field trip. I still remember when -as a child- we met many families on a field trip organized with picnic baskets, refrigerated bags, and portable iceboxes.

The Easter menu is always excessive and leaves leftovers for the next day. We also have many recipes created ad hoc for the picnic. Nowadays it’s still the same and people tend to get out of the cities on Easter Mondays.

At Easter, people bring hard-boiled eggs to Mass to be blessed, and the most beautiful colors and decorations are created for them.

There are many unique dishes, but the great guest for Easter is the Chocolate egg. We do not have Bunny but we give chocolate eggs to the children. The measures are many, the surprises many more: from eggs with fashionable surprises, with the characters of the cartoons or the films to the ones wrapped in excellent material and with costly surprises

This is also because now chocolate eggs are no longer just for children. Or maybe it’s because we stay children forever?

Many shops have small lotteries to win large eggs. And It’s so beautiful to break a great big egg, even though most of the time the surprise is little.

And all the chocolate? We can use it to make cakes all year round.

Then we have the Colomba Pasquale, a traditional soft cake with dough very similar to a Panettone, realized into a dove shape and topped with pearl sugar and almonds.