Hello my blog fans – comin’ at ya with yet another bomb post today. I am super happy to be hearing that everyone has been appreciating my posts as much as I have liked writing them.
Today we ventured away from Milan, going on a day trip to Como, Italy – an absolutely gorgeous northern Italian city known for its waterfront views and silk production. We started the day off by traveling to Mantero Seta, a print and textile production company, for our first site visit of the trip. With a tour guide leading us through the company’s facilities we got to see their vault of prints they’ve saved up from over the one hundred years they’ve been designing fashions, their printing presses where they add paint to the fabrics one color at a time, and their new fabric “printing” technology.
My experience at Mantero was truly a “pinch-me moment” for the business nerd that I am. These fabric print swatches in their archive are labelled with top brands like Gucci, Chanel, Prada, and Louis Vuitton. I think it is so crazy that this Plus3 program has been able to open up the door for regular Pitt students like us to have the chance to literally feel the fabrics of the next summer 2019 Louis Vuitton collection. If you can’t tell from my poorly written paragraph… the experience blew me away so much that I can’t even gather my thoughts properly.
After our factory visit, we went to the city center of Como and ate lunch as a group at a quaint café. We were all given a list of types of pizza we could pick from, and instead of picking something typical like cheese, I wanted to be adventurous and order something exotic – so I eventually decided on a random pizza named “salami piccante.” A few minutes later my pizza came out… it was pepperoni.
We also got the chance to go on a walking tour and boat tour of the city, which was my favorite part of the day. A little background about me – when I was younger I went to sleep-away-sailing-camp and being on the boat made me so happy bringing back all the memories from the good-ole days. The boat ride became even more exciting when it began to torrential downpour rain and a group of us decided that would make for the perfect time to hold a full-on photo shoot.
As a part of our photo shoot, I took the gem picture (at top) where Nick Fratto, depicting his part in the photograph above as the gracious poncho model, randomly pulled out a Pitt poncho from nowhere. I was in such awe that he was somehow in possession of the exact type of poncho I have to wear as a Pathfinder literally once a week, so I felt like taking a picture was the only option to do the moment justice. I love Pitt so much and the fact that I can find ways, no matter how small, to celebrate it no matter where I go (all over the world in this case) just makes me smile.
Ending with my fun fact of the day: George Clooney owns a waterside villa on lake Como that we passed by today. Our tour guide told us that just for the simple fact that he has lived in it, it’s price value increased to $50 million. Moral o the story is – it pays to have star power people.