The appeal of travel blogs: the image of Italy through American eyes

Tourism discourse has been the centre of increasing scholarly interest over the last two decades (e.g. Dann 1996; Cappelli 2006; Gotti 2006; Nigro 2006; Antelmi et al. 2007; De Stasio & Palusci 2007; Francesconi 2007, 2014; Fodde & van den Abbeele 2012; Maci 2013). In this chapter I focus on a genre \u2013 the travel blog \u2013 that has only recently drawn the attention of researchers in applied linguistics research (Gerbig and Shek 2007; Dann and Liebman Parrinello 2007; Cappelli 2008, 2013a; Gerbig 2008; Orlando 2009; Francesconi 2012; Cacchiani 2014; D\u2019Egidio 2014; Denti 2015; Goethals 2015). Travel blogs pertain to what Dann (1996: 143) calls the \u201con-trip stage\u201d of the tourist cycle: they are web-based travel diary-like accounts written and shared by travellers while they are still on the road and made freely available online (Cappelli 2006; Dann and Liebman Parrinello 2007). Next to more \u2018traditional\u2019 written genres such as guidebooks, travel reviews, brochures and institutional web genres (e.g. Castello 2002; Vestito 2006; Francesconi 2007; Santulli 2011; Cappelli 2013b), travel blogs have become increasingly popular both as a form of \u201cdigital story-telling\u201d (Pudliner 2007: 46) about travellers\u2019 experiences, and as a source of information on selected places, providing a market potential in the tourism industry (Pan et al. 2007; Akehurst 2009).The present chapter intends to contribute to this line of research by exploring how the image of Italy is represented by American travel bloggers. The focus is that of identifying the cultural-specific aspects that better represent the Italianit\ue0 to American travellers through an analysis of the lexis that is employed to construct and transmit Italian culture