Snakes and shoes

Hello and welcome to the latest blog from The Olivia Rose Diaries on October 17th 2025. I’m going to begin this blog with a video and leave you guessing as to where I am.

I’m not really a museum type of person but there are two museums a short train ride from Valence that appealed to me. The first is in the neighbouring town of Tain l’Hermitage and is called ‘la Cité du Chocolat’. As a life-long chocoholic how could I resist? The museum provided a history of chocolate and how it is made and also hosted a retail ’boutique’ for the Valrhona brand of upmarket chocolates. When I say upmarket it might help to put it in perspective if I tell you that they sell their handmade chocolates for 106.63 euros per kilo, and that’s just their basic range.

The museum side of things was one of those interactive displays with headphones at various information points which I’m usually no great lover of. However this was quite well done, and if you were willing to listen to a short video about how we taste chocolate you were issued a free sample from an automatic dispenser! Bribery perhaps, but it worked.

It appears that chocolate is similar to wine in that it has subtle tones if you have the palette to recognise them: woody or fruity, honey or almond, subtle or intense and so on. There are clues that will tell you about a chocolate:  the sound that it makes as you break it in half, how it smells, and then there was a simple multiple choice questionnaire for you to pick out the flavours as you let it melt on your tongue. I got most of the answers wrong, from which I deduce that I’ll never get a job as a chocolate taster. Blast  – a  lifelong ambition dashed.

But let’s get back to the snakes. Snakes in a chocolate museum? Yes! And spiders and some rather sweet tortoises. They had created a very life-like ‘son-et-lumière’ jungle effect in the section which explained how the cocoa tree grew and was harvested. Beneath my feet creatures scuttled and slithered about the forest floor. At times they left the floor and suddenly appeared on the bench that I was sitting on, a somewhat disconcerting experience until I got used to it.

Each year the cocoa tree produces thousands of tiny flowers, of which only one in each thousand will become a fruit, called a cherelle, which after three to four months will become a pod.

Another part of the museum showed the process that transforms these pods into chocolate, a complex and precisely controlled procedure. There is a sense of pride here, decades of knowledge handed down, continually being refined. Making good chocolate is a craft, an art form.

Which brings us neatly round to the chocolate boutique: more chocolate than you can imagine, a dangerous place for me although I had resolved that this was to be a look and don’t touch visit. I may love chocolate but not at those prices. But….another free chocolate sample on the way in proved to be my downfall. It was a praline and it was sooooo good. So I made an investment in a little sac of 10 chocolates of my choice, vowed to eat just one each day and savour every mouthful – money well spent I think.

And so to the next museum, another day and another train trip, this time to the charming town of Romans, where giant shoe sculptures are scattered around the old city, and the Musée de la Chaussure houses an extensive collection of shoes from ancient times to modern day.

I’ve included a few of the shoe sculptures for you below.

The museum housed a collection of footwear from all over the world.

It was immediately noticeable that many of these shoes were worn primarily by the fashionable elite, rather than the working classes, and given how uncomfortable they look, they paid a heavy price for being trend setters.

This was such a fascinating place that I could show you loads more photos but I will force myself to stop here! Instead I’ll leave you with two photos that are not of museums. I spotted this cat sitting in the window of an art gallery. I asked the owner if it was ok to take a picture and she said that she got more interest in the cat than she did in her paintings.

And that’s it for this week. See you again soon.

MJ