During my sabbatical in the spring of 2006, I reveled in a three week visit to four Tuscan cities, Pisa, Florence, Siena and Lucca. In each of these Italian cities, I meandered through churches, shrines, art museums, galleries, historic sites, markets, gardens and parks. Everywhere I went while I was out and about exploring each city, I collected materials to use for collages in my travel journal. The collages incorporate maps, tickets, receipts, food wrappers, brochures, pamphlets, placemats, paper bags and found snippets. Each evening the gathered materials were sorted by city and site. Then I cut, tore, arranged and rearranged the images together until they made visual sense and somehow reflected what I had seen and experienced. The journal has thirty-four written pages and thirty-nine pages with images on them.

In the fall of 2006, I exhibited my sabbatical work on campus in the exhibition, Angi Curreri - Small Offering and Silvia Lizama - Photography. In order to include the collages from my Tuscan Journal in the exhibit, sixteen images were scanned directly into the computer and printed actual size. The original journal was exhibited opened to the final collage, Frutta Bella, in order to show the difference between the actual collages and the scans. Sadly the journal was stolen from this exhibition.