Modica, a small town in Sicily’s south-east, boasts among its cultural heritage a very special museum, the Modica Chocolate Museum, born with the aim of protecting and maintaining that knowledge linked to the city’s centuries-old chocolate tradition. The Modica Chocolate Museum was inaugurated in April 2014 and housed in the Palazzo della Cultura. Inside the museum you can find 22 statues, among which a so realistic bench, that you could unconsciously sit on it.
In the entrance hall you will find an amazing map of Italy, where you can admire some of the monuments of main cities, all made of chocolate (Rome with the Colosseum, Pisa with its Leaning Tower, Turin with the Mole Antonelliana).
Modica Chocolate (in local dialect ciucculatta muricana) is a special kind of chocolate that still follows an ancient tradition of “cold working”. Due to this working the Modica chocolate is grainy and crumbly, with a dark black colour and brown reflections. In the XVI century the Spanish had taken this ancient culture, similar to the Aztec, from their colonies in Mexico back to their homeland. Similar workings are still found in Spain and in some communities in Mexico and Guatemala.
The link between chocolate, a tourist-cultural attractor, and the territory has urged the museum managers to focus on the services of use, on the sensory laboratories and on the historical gestures of manipulation, proposed in the section of the DAMMASU RO CIUCCULATTARU (Workshop of 1746 of the chocolate masters of Modica), evoking the original posture of the chocolate master of Modica, the guardian of the Spanish culture.
