Day three in Milan began with the hotel breakfast again, and we took the metro for the first time! We became comfortable navigating the metro and transferring lines. Our first destination of the day was the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart and we used to metro to travel there. At the university we received a lecture from Professor Francesca Romana Rinaldi who teaches there. Professor Rinaldi is a sustainable fashion expert who has authored the book The Responsible Fashion Company and is a speaker at the United Nations on this topic as well. She delivered a lecture about the fashion and luxury industries in terms of the differences between them, specific companies, and mainly focused on sustainability. The lecture was fascinating and truly eye-opening to the unsustainable nature of fast-fashion companies, especially in terms of the detrimental impact on the environment. Two things that Professor Rinaldi said that really stuck out to me was that the fashion industry is the second most polluting industry behind the oil industry and that to produce one pair of jeans, ten thousand liters of water are used. Ten THOUSAND. That is roughly 2,600 gallons of water! That fact is truly mind-blowing to me. Many of my clothes come from fast-fashion stores, but after this lecture, in the future I will try to limit my purchasing of clothing from these stores. On another note, the university was very pretty and we were shown around by a few Italian students. There are so many superstitions that they told us about such as if you walk under a certain tree or between certain columns that you will not graduate.
We ate lunch at their university cafeteria which was interesting to compare to Market Central. I thought it was good (possibly because I was starving), but it was still cafeteria food.
Also, I feel like I need to comment about how good my dinner was last night. The restaurant had a menu where you picked out a fun pasta shape and a sauce; I ordered orecchiette and a pesto sauce (picture inserted). I also had my first Italian coffee at al bar today and had an amazing cold, vanilla, shaken coffee drink. 10/10. This might be turning into a food blog.
In the afternoon we took a tour of the “Leonardo Da Vinci” Museum of Science and Technology. This is a special year in Italy because 2019 is the five hundred year anniversary of his death. We saw a wide variety of things from three dimensional models of Da Vinci’s drawings to a giant telescope to a piece of the moon. Tomorrow we are off to Lake Como for the day!
Arrivederci!