By Ebony Glover
While in Italy for my semester abroad, the one thing I needed to experience was buying a real leather product! Italy is the home of, and quite known for, leather which they make out of just about every animal. During a class, we took a field trip to Scuola del Cuoio, which is an Italian hand-made leather shop and school. During our visit, we learned about the materials, what products are created and how their business became one of the biggest leather shops in the world.
As soon as you walk into the store, you immediately smell leather. They had an abundance of small wallets, change purses, belts, brief cases and more. Across from our apartment, we had a leather market where individual vendors sell their form of leather. The difference between the market and Scuola del Cuoio is that Scuola del Cuoio has real authentic leather, and the leather markets weren’t 100% real. However, they were still very cute. Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford the authentic leather goods from the shop, but I bought a beautiful bag from the leather markets that still has the same sentimental value to me as a real authentic bag would.