A faux-foreign Friday?

Bereft of a blip for today because my planned office day didn't happen, which meant I wasn't coincidentally in town to watch the Royal Scotsman train again, I realised this evening that I was holding an interesting subject.  This is my fancy tea caddy for fancy teabags (currently Redbush,  which I had never heard of until we bought a box on holiday).  It originally contained some lovely hazelnut chocolates.

All this time I had assumed the chocs were made by some random faceless confectionary company and that the tin was merely designed to look old and classic and pretend-Italian.  Stefano Pernigiotti & Figlio?  Novi-Ligure?  Surely all made-up names.  And on the back of the tin, a rosy-cheeked little girl with black curly hair, a lacy dress and an earnest smile, holding a box of chocolates.

But the tin also has a little picture of a factory building on it and, naturally, I started to wonder if it really existed.

Well, it turns out I was completely wrong about it all being made up.  Novi Ligure is (of course) a town in Piedmont, northern Italy, about 75 miles from Turin, and Pernigiotti is indeed a chocolate company.  It was owned by the Pernigotti family for five generations.  Franceso started the business in 1860, and in 1995 it was sold by Stefano who died five years later at the grand old age of 98.  In 2022, chocolatemaking resumed at the factory in Novi Ligure.  You can see the main entrance if you look down Via Ramiro Ginoccio from Viale della Rimembranza.  The entrance, and indeed the whole factory, looks prosaic and rambling, but apparently Pernigiotto is to chocolate and nougat what Ferrari is to cars.

I can confirm though that the hazelnut chocolates were very, very good.