Mrozowska’s life changes when she goes to Milan. There, she meets a wealthy banker of Polish descent, Józef Toeplitz. The marriage with the director of Banca Commerciale Italiana allows Jadwiga to throw herself into a new whirl of adventure.
As Madame Toeplitz-Mrozowska, she runs an artist salon where Milan’s writers and musicians meet. She develops her academic interests: she learns new languages, reads about geography, history and astronomy.
She quickly discovers her biggest passion: travel. She used to go on holidays abroad before, but now she can travel on a bigger scale. First, she tours Europe, but after that, as early as 1919, she departs for Asia. She will systematically visit it for a decade.
She starts with South India, Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) and Burma (Myanmar). Next is Asia Minor (Turkey), the Tigris-Euphrates Valley and Persia. After eight years she returns to India to get through to Kashmir and Tibet.
At first, she travels as a tourist but soon enough discovering foreign countries becomes her second profession. She brings back piles of notes, maps and souvenirs: she will hand over many of these to the National Museum in Warsaw.
Her journey to Pamir in 1929 is the crowning of her ambitions as a traveller. Toeplitz-Mrozowska is now a member of the Italian Geographical Society (Reale Società Geografica Italiana) which gives her an offer to organise a scientific expedition.
The goal: study the mountains on the borders of today’s Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and China. The Pole secures funding for the expedition and, with the help of her husband, handles the paperwork connected with crossing through the Soviet Union.
The team embarks on a two-month-long journey which turns out to be extremely exhausting. They are hampered by low temperatures, endangered by bandit assaults, low on food and water and weakened by high altitudes (over 4,000 metres above sea level). However, in the end, they succeed: they create a map of territories which were unknown before and trace new mountain trails.