(New York Times)

The streets of Turin may be overflowing with Olympics visitors for a few weeks, but they always overflow with chocolate. Perhaps in no other place in the world, and certainly no other city in Europe, do so many pastry shops and chocolate-makers roast and blend their own cacao beans. The cafes of Turin, still the world's most sumptuous and beautiful, are famous for serving the city's own hot-chocolate-and-espresso drink called bicerin, a fabulous layered concoction served in glass cups. It's easy to stroll down the arcaded shopping streets and sample bars and fancifully shaped pralines wrapped in foil and colored papers with appealing Art Nouveau designs.

But the chocolate par excellence — the one that says Turin to the rest of Italy — is the foil-wrapped mini-ingot called giandujotto. Biting into one isn't like eating any other kind of chocolate. The flavor of roasted hazelnuts comes through every bite, with the fruity high notes of fine Central American chocolate in the city's best. The depth of the hazelnuts balances the fruit of the chocolate, and anchors an experience that with the vinification of chocolate has become all too ethereal.

The mysterious potency and semi-addictiveness of the combination is familiar to anyone who has smeared Nutella on bread or simply dipped a spoon into a jar of it. Gigi Padovani, a journalist for La Stampa of Turin and author of a brisk history, "Nutella, un Mito Italiano" ("Nutella, an Italian Myth," Rizzoli, 2004), calls the spread the "good blob."

Nutella conquered the world soon after it was invented in Piedmont, the northwestern Italian region of which Turin is the capital, and went onto the market in 1964. But the combination of hazelnut and chocolate predated Nutella by a couple of centuries, and, like much brilliant inspiration, was born of necessity.

By the late 18th century (about 150 years after Cortes had introduced chocolate to Spain in 1528) Turin was an international chocolate capital, thanks to trade relations between the ruling House of Savoy and the Spanish court. Turin's chocolate producers exported 750 pounds a day to Austria, Switzerland, Germany and France, according to Sandro Doglio's "Il Dizionario di Gastronomia del Piemonte" ("The Dictionary of Piedmont Gastronomy," Daumerie, 1995). Swiss chocolate-makers came to Turin to learn their trade.

But supplies of chocolate from the New World became irregular during a naval blockade imposed by Napoleon in 1806 (the French then ruled Piedmont), and the city's chocolate-makers had to look to local products as surrogates. The world's sweetest, most prized hazelnuts grow in the misty hills of the Alta Langa, the southern region of Piedmont around Alba. Roasted and ground with chocolate, the nuts helped the chocolate-makers stretch a scarce import.