Cartoline da Napoli: l’esperienza turistica italiana e inglese

The construction of a touristic city has a dual dimension, local and international, depending on the cultural parameters and the cognitive schemes of those who stay or want to stay there [Rojek, Urry 1997]. As observed by Craik [1997,118], “the cultural experiences offered by tourism are consumed in terms of prior knowledge, expectations, fantasies and mythologies generated in the tourist’s origin culture rather than by the cultural offerings of the destination.” In this perspective, it is interesting to compare the representations of Naples tourism in the English and the Italian contexts, and see how they can be influenced by the socio-cultural component. Based on a parallel corpus of recent tourist guidebooks, the study examines the kind of attractions Naples offers to Italian and English tourists and seeks to investigate similarities and differences. A two-pronged approach has been adopted for the analysis of content and style with particular attention to the semiotic space shaped by tourist discourse and to linguistic indicators such as lexical networks, metaphor, and verbal processes.