Disseminating the Florentine Cultural Heritage through Travel Blogs

The chapter explores how the image of Florence is represented by American travel bloggers. The study combines corpus and discourse-analytic perspectives with the aim of investigating the cultural-specific aspects that represent the Florentine cultural heritage to American travellers through an analysis of the lexis employed to construct and transmit it. The analysis, based on a pilot study of 55 travel blogs, shows that art and gastronomy are the domains of experience that American travellers mostly focus upon in their subjective narrations about Florence, and references to such domains are typically found in recurrently employed evaluative expressions. The study indicates that evaluation is one of the key features used to represent Florence, by which American tourists not only express their comments about the city, but also point out what is potentially desirable for other visitors.