Blogging about London: comparing the Italian and Anglo-American tourist gaze

Abstract

The present study aims at identifying the Italian and Anglo-American tourist gaze upon London, i.e. to show how London – one of the world’smost visited destinations – is perceived and described through language by Italian and Anglo-American tourists. To this purpose, a corpus of Italian and English travel blogs was created and used. The creation of a word frequency list of both corpora allowed us to identify four semantic categories of words – landmark sights/attractions; natural environment; food & drinks; andmeans of transport – corresponding to the different “faces” of London seen by the tourists. For each category, themost frequent and functional words (or groups of words) were considered and analysed to see how they are represented by the tourists of both cultures. The Italian and Anglo-American tourist gaze upon London were then compared and contrasted. The findings suggest that the differences between the two gazes find reason in different cultural backgrounds.