When it comes to passionate love and how to hone physical attraction, Italians are said to be masters. They have the flirting skills, the charm and know-how of Latin lovers and femme fatales. So it’s no surprise that they’ve also concocted a potent, innuendo-inducing food to help boost the chemistry of encounters and enhance the thrill of sensual nights.

In Asia, people drink snake blood to get the hormones going; in Italy there’s pig blood. Sanguinaccio – literally meaning “ugly blood” in Italian – is a popular, huge, salami-shaped tube of meat (or chocolate) made with pig blood and believed to be a powerful aphrodisiac. Its shape, too, might strike a familiar chord.