My professional experience Civitella was invaluable.   I had in mind that I would make some small collages but I had no idea what the subject matter would be.

I spent time in the library looking through various books on architecture and gardens and decided that as I was living and working in a castle, it would make sense to make work with that subject.  I brought basic material with me (tracing paper, pencils, and a cutting knife) and on each excursion I looked for raw materials (magazines) that I thought would be appropriate for the images that I had selected from the book of Umbertide castles in the library.   The variety of magazines that I found were completely different from the magazines that I would normally use in Canada.  It made the collages much more loose and magical and moved my investigation forward in a huge way.