Persuasione, tourist gaze e viaggi di lusso: modi comunicativi e culture a confronto

This chapter aims to analyse the strategies used by tourism professionals to describe Italy as a tourist destination for different cultural targets. The analysis will focus in particular on luxury travel and will consider eight websites of luxury tour operators: two agencies based in the USA, two in the UK, two operators based in Italy but targeting an international audience and two Italian tourist agencies advertising luxury travels in Italy to an Italian audience. In order to do that, the linguistic content, the images and the layout of the eight websites will be taken into account and investigated by using the methodological approaches of Corpus Linguistics (Sinclair 1991; Manca 2016a), and of Visual Grammar (Kress, van Leeuwen 2006). The aim of the analysis is the identification of key words and of visual and structural features for each website/language/culture, which will be compared and contrasted to identify similarities and differences in the way Italy is described as a luxury tourist destination.