To start day 3, we had an early morning wake up to go to Cattolica University. This wake up was made less painful by the delicious chocolate croissant provided by the hotel for breakfast. We took the metro to the university, which was insanely crowded during rush hour. I quite literally got very close to my plus 3 group members on the way due to the crammed metro. Despite its crowdedness, I was pleasantly surprised at how clean it was. There was no trash, graffiti, or rats/cockroaches that one can expect to find in a New York subway station. The metro system is also quite easy to understand even though everything is in Italian. At the university, we had a lecture with Professor Francesca Rinaldi, who spoke about sustainability in the fashion supply chain. It expanded on what we had previously learned in our pre-departure meetings, as well as my class curriculum in my freshman year at Pitt. She explained that the fashion industry is second biggest polluter, behind the oil industry which is the first.
My favorite part of the programming of the day was meeting the Italian students at Cattolica. They gave us a tour of the university, which is absolutely beautiful with pretty of old architecture, as it used to be a monastery. I was very eager to talk to the students and really made an effort to have ask lots of questions throughout the tour. The student I talked to most, who also happened to be named Francesca, is a Milan native and gave me lots of recommendations for her favorite parts of the city. She recommended a section of Milan called Navigli, and I’m beyond excited to check it out sometime during our free time. Francesca also said that she will not be done with her semester until July, and she will have to suffer through three weeks of finals. This made me sort of grateful for only having one week of finals at Pitt, and I honestly never thought I’d feel any sort of good feelings towards our finals week. All the students were also incredibly fluent in English. When I mentioned how impressive this was to Francesca, she told me that she thinks there is really no point in learning Italian as it is useless. I found it really surprising that she called her own language pointless, as the past few days I have been desperately wishing I was more competent in the language.
To finish the day’s programming, we went to the Museum of Science and Technology. We learned a lot about Leonardo Da Vinci, who lived in Milan for a huge chunk of his life. The exhibit did a great job of illustrating just how much of a genius he was. I appreciated how he considered art and science to be one, and often incorporated science into his paintings. I thought this was important as today art and science are almost always separated. People are often labeled as an art person or a science person, but never both.
Of course, I finished the day off with some gelato. Tonight’s was good, but so far the best Gelato we have had was at Eataly. I’ve been on a gelato eating streak since I’ve arrived in Italy, and I don’t intend on breaking it anytime soon.
