Faszinierend und exzentrisch - nicht jedermanns Geschmack. Der “Vittoriale degli Italiani” in den Augen deutscher Reisender. Eine soziolinguistische Studie in alten und neuen Medien der Tourismuskommunikation.

Starting from the idea of museum as „a mediating space between cultures“, the paper presents the results of a study focusing on the communicative practices on and around the Vittoriale degli Italiani, the museum complex commemorating Gabriele D’Annunzio’s life and work located in Gardone Riviera on the Lake of Garda. The analysis, based on diverse diachronic and synchronic textual data (tourist guides and travel blogs), takes a sociolinguistic approach in order to reconstruct the perception / evaluation of German tourists faced with the experience of visiting the Vittoriale. Considering the rich symbolic, partly controversial, historic-cultural value of this monumental site and the long-lasting, deep-rooted tradition of contact and exchange between the German culture and the Italian world – as specifically mirrored in the microcosmos represented by the Lacus Benacus –, the paper aims to explain how this particular ‘tourist gaze’ evolved over time reflecting the changing perception of Italy as a tourist destination and of the Italian culture as a whole.