Piedmont landscapes: cultural resources and visual host/guest encounters in SPOT project

Keywords: cultural tourism; landscape; visual culture; Piedmont; Italy
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 39

Abstract

SPOT project (Social and innovative Platform On cultural Tourism and its potential towards deepening Europeanisation) has been funded by the European Commission under Horizon 2020. It started at the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic. Its objectives of proposing and developing new approaches to cultural tourism in 15 case studies. The Italian case study is the area of Langhe, Monferrato and Roero where tourism is motivated by food and wine, but it has significant cultural potentials in terms of both tangible and intangible heritage, monuments and literature at first.
As a whole, in its parts, in its products (food and wine), and in its points of attraction, this area has become a landscape and a "digital" tourist destination that the tourists’ gaze captures through the frame visual of digital photography and digital reproduction through social media (especially Instagram).
The ethnographic research intends to analyse and discuss visual tourist behaviours in some of the tourist attractions that are most photographed and conveyed through social networks such as the Barolo Chapel (Ceretto Winery), the giant benches (Big Bench Community Project), the giant coloured pencils between Mombaruzzo and Coazzolo (Azienda Vinicola Maccario), as well as the castles and viewpoints of the surrounding Alba hills that appear shared spaces of work and leisure. We aim to investigate the mediation role of the landscape in those social media that mainly convey images.