On the language of Florence art museum websites: the Italian texts of the "virtual tour"

This paper investigates the language of the Italian explanatory texts accompanying the artworks displayed on a virtual tour offered by Florence art museum websites. As shown by applied linguistics research conducted over the past twenty years, great attention has been paid to the way museums communicate with their users through a range of genres such as brochures, catalogues, exhibition press releases and announcements, wall captions. Using a corpus and discourse perspective, this study aims at investigating the main linguistic features which are used to disseminate the Florentine cultural heritage through the texts of the virtual tour in museum websites that still remain an under-explored area of linguistic inquiry. Some implications can be drawn from this study for research on the lexis of Italian and other languages referring to Italian cultural heritage.