“Visit our Ancient Factories and Book your Tour”: Analysing the Online Promotional Discourse of Italian Enogastronomic Tours

Enogastronomic tourism refers to clients’ specific enthusiasm for visiting the area in which a product is made so that they can taste and buy at the source. This form of tourism has indeed become highly popular in Italy too, developing in several branches of the agri-food sector. As a result, a considerable number of Italian wine, vinegar and/or cheese producers are offering their (prospective) foreign clients special tours aimed at tempting them into booking a stay, encouraging them to discover the picturesque natural locations and eventually to buy their top-quality products. With this purpose, the promotional discourse on Italian websites offering such tours must aim “to persuade, lure, woo and seduce” (Dann 1996, 2) visitors, convincing them to discover the Italian countryside and products. Since (re)presenting places and its people is not guided by a “value-free” (Pritchard and Morgan 2001, 177) perspective, but rather by the deliberate intention to promote such destinations, comprehending how discourse is moulded to influence readers’ perception of the local context would seem relevant. This paper aims at investigating the linguistic strategies used in the digital environment to promote enogastronomic tours across Italy by mainly considering how phraseology and units of meaning extend participation framework and open the way for new communicative contexts. Basing the investigation on both quantitative and qualitative methods, the English versions of a corpus of Italian wine, vinegar, beer, pasta, olive oil and cheese websites (around 100) will be taken into consideration in order to analyse how online narrative contributes to promoting this form of tourism as well as to understand how clients’ experience positively coexists with the promotion of local/regional products (Meluzzi and Balsamo 2021).