The museum of the day was positively enormous. It had many rooms filled with paintings that were possibly the originals, some of them able to span a bedroom wall. Unfortunately, once again, pictures were not allowed, so I only got a few. It started with the older paintings, then there was a section with more contemporary paintings, meaning in the nineteenth century for the most part. There was one painting that was famous by with a strangely shaped face of a man, but I have forgotten the name of the painter. Anyways, this museum was very diverse in that it showed different time periods and artists. I was able to distinguish most artists from each other by the end of the museum, primarily in the area with the older paintings. The golden backgrounds used in religious pieces almost make it so that it will always be in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. They always seem to have the same mood, too – extreme reverence and a unique display of emotion.
We did a lot of walking in the hot sun again, but my feet no longer could get tired. There were many things to see in Milan, and the student group that had gone to Italy last year had spent much more time in Milan and less in Rome.
In the afternoon, we walked to the university in Milan and actually met some of the engineering professors there and got a quick tour of the engineering part of the university, including some of the labs and a nice demonstration of the equipment used. We then had three lectures, just for our group; one was about non-destructive testing, another about the evaluation of different materials against flooding, and the last about masonry. They were interesting and relevant, but the Italian professors used PowerPoint presentations and had a lot of words on each slide, which became boring, especially the last one, in which a couple students nearly fell asleep. It really was hard to understand the last professor because of her excessive accent.
A few of the students in our group went to the nearby supermarket and bought supplies to make a Mexican dinner, so we had tacos, another nice little break from the native cuisine. We still had yet to eat the food of the authentic locals, which would probably happen in one of the smaller towns because they couldn’t import food as easily.
