Italien für italienische und deutsche Touristen: linguistisch-semiotische Analyse audiovisueller Online-Reiseführer

The topic of this article are the Italian and the German audio-visual travel guides with Italy as destination of cultural tourism. The concept of “cultural assets” assumes fundamental importance, as it determines this kind of tourism from a social, linguistic and normative perspective. From a linguistic point of view, it is interesting to study the verbal and visual conceptualisation of cultural assets of Italian places in guides of different languages in order to: A. see how Italy is presented to national and international tourists; B. identify the kind of tourists as addresses of these texts; C. find out the interrelations between the verbal, visual, acoustic and iconic codes to build the cultural assets. Based on a corpus of travel guides about Milan, Genoa, Padua, Vicenza, Pisa, Andria and Palermo, the paper outlines the most important results of the linguistic-semiotic study.