"Italian licorice" news and stories

I've never liked American licorice candies, since they have no licorice flavor whatsoever. I've sampled some of the Dutch double-salt licorice and while it's certainly an acquired taste, it's one I do enjoy, particularly when I'm in the mood for an extreme licorice experience.

But my hands-down favorite for licorice has to be the Italian candies made by Menozzi De Rossa. Being the sucker for cool foreign packaging that I am, I have to admit that that's one reason I like them. Lunik, with its nifty slide-drawer metal container sports a doctor jauntily pointing at the name. It reminds me of packaging for an old-time patent medicine. Rombetti di Liquirizia all'Anice, brings to mind Peter Max because of the picture of a gnome bearing a bundle of bright flowers interspersed with licorice cylinders.

Aesthetics aside the real reason I like these candies so much is because of their intensity of flavor. Each is only half as big as a pencil eraser, but the the licorice flavor lasts for five minutes minutes or more. I presently own three containers. At the rate I'm going through them I should have exhausted my supply by 2010.