The tourist gaze in English, Italian and German travel articles about Puglia: A corpus-based study

This paper shows how online travel articles may provide important insights into how a tourist destination is perceived and to what extent what is known as the ‘tourist gaze’ may be used to recontextualise tourist material in order to produce more effective tourist texts, which meet receivers’ expectations. For this purpose, three comparable corpora of online travel articles in English, Italian and German language were assembled and analysed in order to understand the way ordinary travellers perceive and experience a tourist destination in Italy (Puglia) by taking language as a point of reference. The first fifteen words of the frequency lists in the three corpora highlighted what landmarks and elements of attraction English, Italian and German travel writers gaze at while on holiday in Puglia. The analysis demonstrated that the Italian tourist gaze is different from the English and German tourist gazes, since not all of them focus on the same landscapes, and even when they gaze at the same sights, their perception and representation are often different. The similarities and differences between the ways the tourists behave suggest a distinction between a model of ‘global gaze’ embodied by English and German travellers, seen as ‘outsiders’, and a model of ‘local gaze’ embodied by Italian tourists, seen as ‘insiders'