“In fair Verona, where we lay our scene”. A multimodal analysis of the tourist gaze on Verona in travel blogs

Abstract

The increasing presence and popularity of online travel blogs has recently added another layer to tourism discourse studies and to destination marketing, eliciting interest in research on user-generated content in tourism. Such blogs have been recognized as valuable sources of information as they are based on actual travel experiences; as a consequence, they can generate digital word-of-mouth communication to prospective visitors, potentially influencing their destination choices. This paper aims to investigate tourist perceptions and representations of Verona from a multimodal perspective, in order to explore the tourist gaze (Urry 1990) on the city, with an additional focus on its relation to the popular imagery of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. To this purpose, a number of blog entries about Verona from two travel blog platforms (TravelBlog, Travellerspoint) and individual non-professional blogs were analyzed, for a total of 100 entries published from 2010 to 2018. A quantitative-qualitative mixed approach will be adopted to analyze the language used in the blogs as well as the accompanying images, also drawing on Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar model (2006).