Telling Stories About a Rich Heritage Destination. Narratives and Navigations

Antonio Lenzo (), Adine Gavazzi and Lorenzo Cantoni
Additional contact information
Antonio Lenzo: UNESCO Chair Università della Svizzera italiana
Adine Gavazzi: UNESCO Chair Università della Svizzera italiana
Lorenzo Cantoni: UNESCO Chair Università della Svizzera italiana

Chapter 46 in Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2026, 2026, pp 683-694 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The online presentation of a destination, attraction or related tourism player demands that their managers choose and enact adequate narratives. This happens in a twofold way: on the one hand, explicitly, by recourse to texts, images, videos and the like; on the other, tourism players may more implicitly flesh out their stories through outbound links to external resources, establishing an informal network of reference, i.e. the set of associations between institutions that outbound links may implicitly suggest for users. The case of Monte San Giorgio as a tourism destination is presented, exploring most of the relevant online narratives and the links provided by concerned players and institutions. Such a case is of particular interest because it blends a very clear identity as a natural UNESCO World Heritage Site with a significant presence of further narratives—including archeology, botany, religious traditions and eno-gastronomy—, with implications for practitioners of destination systems with a complex identity. This study highlights the predominant role of the paleontological narrative, linked to the UNESCO listing, at times combined with further perspectives. When further relevant narratives are present, they are frequently narrated with no connection with the previous one. Furthermore, external links do not lead to a clear and dense network structure: most websites lack outbound links, while the few with links seldom tend to point to a select number of websites. A potential theoretical suggestion is that network-ness as implied by outbound linking activity is a decreasingly salient feature of institutional website communication in heritage destinations, while practitioners may glint that the role of outbound linking is of reduced or oblique relevance to the construction of online narrations in heritage destination systems.

Keywords: Digital storytelling; Heritage tourism; Destination narratives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:prbchp:978-3-032-23925-9_46

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783032239259

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-23925-9_46

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().