Tourism Websites: Strolling and scrolling through Capri.net

The World Wide Web has now become the fastest growing advertising medium, thus making online advertising of vital importance to the advertising industry (Ha 2012). Elaborate new technologies, such as eye tracking, for investigating consumers’ processing/interpretation of meaningful visual elements (Lagerwerf/van Hooijdonk/Korenberg 2012), are now being used to fully exploit the multimodal resources of contemporary communication. Accordingly, investigating the language of advertising entails a multidisciplinary perspective, ranging from cognition and neuroscience to decision making, marketing, statistics, emotion retrieval from the web (Burns/Matarazzo/Abbamonte 2014), and web advertising, with its fast-evolving genres and global-wide target audiences. Among such genres, promotional tourism communication, which traditionally attempts to persuade, lure and seduce millions of potential clients (Dann 1996), has increasingly been enhanced by online resources. The present study will focus on one of the most appealing and exhaustive websites dedicated to Capri, www.capri.net/it/ (available both in Italian and in English). In capri.net the ‘enshrinement’ (MacCannell 1976), or ‘framing’, of Capri is mainly displayed through a sequence of iconic images aiming at signalling the eco-aesthetic and historical-cultural features of the Blue Island. Throughout this website’s pages, information and promotion/persuasion are deftly blended, using a carefully constructed hierarchy of presentation/ foregrounding. We will investigate its main lines of appeal (Dyer 1988), i.e. landscape and shore excursions, glamour, (habitué) celebrities and nightlife, cuisine, luxury, shopping, wedding locations, ancient historical places, and the cultural memory (Assman 2008) of the illustrious people who brought the island worldwide.