Today was our last day in Italy but it still doesn’t feel real. This morning we took the Milan metro for the last time as a huge group of 28 people to go explore the fashion library of Milan. This library holds over 70,000 books that are related to fashion, but books being everything that ranged from magazines to look books to one of the ten newspapers that are published by fashion library. Fun fact: the fashion library is celebrating its ten anniversary this year! Another cool fact is that everything in the archive is either from the personal collection of the man who opened the library or a donation from connections or visitors to the fashion library, which is insane considering how many items are stored there.

Considering the 70,000 books, the library is very small and wasn’t much larger than the average hotel room. The main archive was in the basement of the building while there was a floor upstairs where there as a kitchen and a place where designers come to display fashion shows and have photo shoots. In the upper part of this building there were a lot of cool mannequins that had been donated that had been made by the most famous mannequin designer in the world. ThT was very cool to me as it showed how dependent the library is on donations which is a very cool concept as almost nothing is bought yet designers and students and even lawyers across Italy come to the library for inspiration and research.

After the library, we had our farewell lunch which was bittersweet. I don’t think I realized until the lunch that today was our last day and that after today we would all be going our separate ways. It was nice to see Lorenzo one last time and we even got to meet Diego! And I had one of my favorite dishes – risotto with pork and chocolate cake.

After lunch, we walked around the square we first went through on our first day in Milan and basically window shopped. Shelby and I saw really cool shoes at Corso Como but our exact size wasn’t available unfortunately so we walked out empty handed, but still cool to be back again. For dinner we were also in the same square and I legit had the best pizza in my life. It was almost like a deep dish pizza which is very unusual for Italian pizzas.

I’m really sad that this trip is over and it still feels very surreal. I hope one day that I can come back to visit these cities but I feel very lucky to have gone on the trip. So for now, arrivederci forever Italy!