When Frank Chiappa went to the his mother?s homeland in search of the arts he he had no idea what treasures were in store for him.

Mr. Chiappa went to the Azores as a way of bringing something back for the Portuguese people who have inhabited Bermuda for the last 150 years.

Mr. Chiappa?s father was an Italian, but he was intrigued by the landscapes, the cloud cover and the unlimited natural beauty of the Azores.

He spent six weeks in the Azores last summer. While there he met the nephew of one of the most famous Azorean artists Luis Dinis and he was able to explore and seek out other treasures.

The exhibition, which opens on Friday at the Masterworks Rose Garden Gallery, features landscapes, men on donkeys, mosaic sidewalks and some famous buildings that perhaps only natives and visitors would remember.

Mr. Chiappa said he only liked to show his work about every two years.

?I don?t believe in crowding the market,? he said.

He said the inspiration came from wanting to do something with his roots on his maternal side.

?I wanted to do something with the Portuguese culture here and being brought up in a Portuguese Bermudian home,? he said. ?I also thought there had not been another Bermudian who had done a show on the Azores and there is a large Portuguese culture here.

?I really found it interesting and different to do.?

Mr. Chiappa said the project has been about a year?s work and it has required a lot of research.

?There is a gentleman at the Vasco de Gama Club, who takes care of their cultural affairs and folk dance, and he gave me some old black and white photographs ? so a couple of the paintings that I did are based on them.?

He was not prepared for some of the simply beautiful effects of everyday living that he spotted in the Azores.

Mr. Chiappa said: ?On the sidewalks there is artwork that looks like mosaics of fish, ships and the conch shell. I took a lot of photographs - it was so beautiful.?

He also delved into the more spiritual aspects of the Azorean way of life.

?The Portuguese people are very religious and I?ve done a picture of Santo Christa,? he said, ?It is the one they carry in the procession on the third Sunday after Easter, which is a big religious festival.

?I also did St. Theresa and they called her the little flower. She is a representation of my mother, my grandmother, everybody rolled into one from a spiritual point of view.

?I am a Catholic and when I was doing the show, I said, I definitely want to do some religious ones.?

Mr. Chiappa said he was told by Penny Souza-Fowkes, owner of Twice Told Tales, that St. Therese of Lisieux, was a French nun who died of tuberculosis in her early 20s.

?I couldn?t figure out what to call the her and Ms Souza explained to me,? he said.

Mr. Chiappa said producing the exhibition had called on all his talents and diverse painting forms.

?This exhibition is a little different for me and I am excited about the show. It encompasses city scapes and landscapes as well as portraits,? he said.

Another painting that will be shown in the exhibition will be a piece based on a national park in San Miguel and the Ponto del Gado city gates.

?This is a man-made park, which was owned by an American gentleman, it is 27-acres and it has a lot of little lakes and waterways,? he said. ?I also did a piece of a natural crater, which spans seven-miles wide. It is huge. One side is turquoise and the other is blue.?

Mr. Chiappa said Povoacao was an area where many Portuguese Bermudians had come from and had returned to.

?I met a man who used to work at the Castle Harbour and now he runs a little restaurant there,? he said.

?But my mother, grandmother, uncles and aunt never went back to the Azores.

?They depend on the returnees to come back and visit. It is a big tourist thing.

?But a lot of the young people don?t want to come back - they want to stay in America. A lot of people go home for six weeks.?

Mr. Chiappa said the cloud cover in the mountainous parts of the Azores was incredible and once he even lost his cab driver on a mountain top.

The length of time that he spent on each piece varied from just a week to six weeks or about 120 hours.

One of his most spectacular finds was one of the Azores older treasures ? artist Luis Dinis.

?I was coming back to the hotel with all my art stuff and I saw this young guy at the front desk who asked if I was an artist,? said Mr. Chiappa.

?So I said yeah and he told me that he was the nephew of one of one of the best artists in San Miguel. He said the artist was in his late 70s, had never been married and all his life he had been dedicated to painting.

?The young man said if I was interested he would take me to his studio. So this guy was a Portuguese-Canadian, but we never really hooked up. But he had showed me a little photo of a picture of Christ that his uncle had drawn.

?But on my return from the island of Santa Maria I went to the eastern end of the Island in a little fishing village called Povoacao. So when I was out having dinner I see all these paintings and I asked the waiter were they for sale and he said, ?hold on I?ll go to get the artist?.

?About ten minutes he returned with this old artist, who didn?t speak much English and my Portuguese wasn?t that great either. But he sat down and he took out some pictures and one of the first ones was the same picture of Christ.?

Mr. Dinis invited him up to his studio and they hung out for a little while and he showed him his art.

?He had hundreds and hundreds of paintings and just before I left I gave him all of my oil paints. I really appreciated his work and it is hard to get art supplies out there. The day before I left he told me to come and choose a painting.

?He did a lot of religious paintings. He was a character and the fact that I met him, was just meant to be.

?He was a means of inspiration as well.?