Following a well-established tradition going back to the 1980s (cf. Volterra 1987/2004), the authors use the name Lingua dei Segni Italiana (Italian Sign Language [LIS]) for the language used by Italian deaf people (and by Swiss deaf people living in the Ticino canton). LIS is becoming more and more visible, and its status as a minority language in the general Italian community is growing stronger due to various reasons. Still, LIS has not yet received formal recognition by the Italian authorities, although various bills are sitting in the Italian parliament for the recognition of LIS as a minority language. This lack of formal recognition has serious consequences (e.g., in the educational system). Deaf children are now generally mainstreamed, and there is no guarantee that LIS will be used in their education. Given this scenario, it is not surprising that existing research on LIS reflects an impressive degree of variation. Still, a comprehensive sociolinguistic study of LIS varieties used around the country has not been systematically carried out until recently. This article describes an extensive collection of data from 10 cities with 165 signers, which at the time of writing had just been concluded and reports on some of the data emerging from the LIS corpus resulting from this collection. The article is organized as follows: The authors first describe the general methodological issues they faced when planning the data collection and which motivated their choice of cities and participants. Then they describe the specific elicitation methods they adopted. After that, they describe in detail both the lexical variations they encountered and the results of the statistical analyses carried out on this part of the corpus. Finally, they present their conclusions. (Contains 6 notes, 6 tables, and 37 figures.)