Consumers of tourism products use destination brochures and travelogs, making them a very important source of information. Even though tourists consider promotional material important, its effectiveness has not been evaluated very often in literature (for important exceptions, see Uzzell, 1984; Weber, 1985; Jenkins, 2003; Molina and Esteban, 2006).

Probably the right step to begin with in order to understand the interplay between texts, namely the promotional material, and the social actors, namely the potential tourists, is to analyze the texts themselves.

The analysis of texts, such as for example, plays and novels, is the very basis of some disciplines in the humanities, such as for example cultural studies (Marcus and Fisher, 1986, among others). As researchers from this discipline have turned their attention to leisure and tourism issues, and with the new awareness of leisure and tourism as “cultural practices,” the approach is playing an increasingly important role in leisure and tourism research. The term “text” is now used to embrace not just printed material but also pictures, recorded music, films, television and web contents. Indeed, virtually any cultural product can in jargon be read as text. The trend is reflected in the increasing use of the term gaze to describe the activity of both tourists and the objects of the tourist research.

From a commercial point of view, the product “tourism” has particular features able to make it different from any other kind of marketing product. In fact, it is not only a positional good, but, in addition, it is made up by both material and immaterial characteristics, as, for example, the quality of the given services.

Generally, we think about tourism as one of the best ways for developing countries and urban areas, but actually there exist some cases in which tourist development can damage the wellbeing of a residential population. It seems that this risk is hidden into the relationship between residents and tourists (Ap, 1992; Jurowski et al., 1997; Gursoy et al., 2002; Andereck et al., 2005), which seems capable to ruin both the tourists' satisfaction and the daily life of residents.

According to the Environmental Bubble Theory (Cohen, 1972), tourists perform a series of strategies in order to remain anchored to their residential spots and avoiding the mentioned risk, having to face the so called cultural shock (Oberg, 1960; Pearce, 1981; Furnham, 1984). The environmental bubble is constituted by a sort of social pellicule able to immunize tourists from the identity/cultural attacks which the visit to a foreign country implies. Such a pellicule is activated by the tourists themselves as they decide to travel in group or, for example, to eat only at the restaurants proposing their own national cuisine, and so on.

Generally the potential cultural shock of residents is not taken into consideration in literature, even if it is plausibile to make the hypothesis of a counter-environmental bubble performed by the residents in order to defend their own culture and their identity from the attacks of mass tourism, especially for cities that live on tourism, as, for example, Florence or Siena do. In such a sense, place attachment is based on the processual landscape of Menatti and Casado da Rocha (2016).

In order to better understand it may be useful to recall the dramaturgic model of Goffman (1959). Tourists, and in a deeper way residents, are on a front region; both the parties have prepared themselves in the back region in order to wear the right mask. There exists a front stage, a sort of surface, and a back stage in which residents defend themselves from mass tourist invasion. This idea is quite near to that one of pseudo-events proposed by Boorstin (1987) according to which residents play pseudo-realities constructed ad hoc for the tourist gaze, reserving for themselves some spaces of real events represented, for example, by tradition (Medina, 2003).

Our study aims at testing the access to local tradition made available in promotional material. The hypothesis we propose is that there should exist a difference in promoting cultural heritage and intimate culture (Smith, 1978). The intimate culture refers to the living culture, the way of living, comprehending cuisine, education, religion, the way by which the role of females and males are performed, and so on. On the other hand, the cultural heritage, or historical culture, makes reference to a culture meant as belonging to the whole mankind, as it happens, for example, for archeological sites or museums. In more detail, we propose the hypothesis that the intimate culture is maintained unaccessible for tourists' gaze, or at least accessible only in the shape of a spectacularized event, the so called pseudo-event Boorstin cites (1964), made up as an ad-hoc product meant to elicite a certain type of reaction in tourists' mind.

In our study our concern has not been devoted to a tourist point of view but rather to the perspective of the institution, and to the kind of relationship it engages with potential visitors. The theoretical framework of reference is made up by information search studies (Xiao and Mair, 2006); in some sense we propose to study the way by which a resort replies to the need for information tourists express.

In addition, tourist promotional material represents the first contact the resort performs with the potential tourist and in this sense it is interesting to analyse such texts, which become able to vehiculate not only transactional but also interactional communication (Brown and Yule, 1983), in the effort of representing residents as well expressing the capability of hospitality.

The textual material we have analyzed concerned the promotion of Siena, a city in Tuscany, Italy, well-known for its surrounding countryside and for its Palio, a horse race run around the central place two times every summer.

In terms of data analysis, we moved from a mere content analysis to a diatextual analysis, able to focus on the different positioning of the self along different ways of vehiculating culture.

The first result is quite evident; the positioning of discourse is deeply unbalanced in favor of the self, like every kind of auto-narration and advertising is (Figure 2).

It is worthy that the only time the text makes reference to a sort of outgroup, to which it does not assign a specified identity, is in order to play a particular narration we may call “competitive narrative” by which it is said that “Ancient olive trees and noble vineyards are the doc signature, the right evaluation of the work done by men who have not destroyed their heritage as it did happen in other parts of the Italian Peninsula” (Brochure, p. 19) by which it is stressed on one hand that Siena has worked and has not destroyed natural resources in comparison with what have been done by other resorts.

As already said, the objects of interest are at the same time the objects with which the resort identifies itself (Figure 3). The focus is well balanced even if it is worthy that the only time there is an explicit reference to the resort identity this happens talking about culture:

This last example is particularly significative since the reference to both intimate culture (the tradition of terracotta) and cultural heritage makes Siena unique but at the same time near tourists' environment, or at least able to talk not only about itself but also about a universal history.

To sum up, the city of Siena seems to present itself as an ideal match of nature and culture, with the culture presented as follows:

The emphasis is on culture meant as cultural heritage, humankind's belonging and not as expression of something living at present (Figure 4).

In this sense, it is significative the conclusion of the section dedicated to “Arts and crafts under banner of tradition” in the brochure “Le Terre di Siena”: “searching for these objects is a golden occasion to live golden occasions…in order to give emotions that help in maintaining alive the memories of a holiday and of an experience meant as unique.” Everything seems functional to tourist satisfaction and seems to loose its own meaning up to the fact that traditional art serves the recollecting phase of tourist behavior.

It is worth our attention that a vague way of communicating information is deeply related to giving information about own culture (Figure 5). In particular, Siena seems to hide some information related to the typical cultural manifestation thanks to which the Tuscany city is well known all around the world: the “Palio dell'Assunta.” To this manifestation a lot of pages are dedicated, both in the folders and in the brochure. One of the folders is dedicated to traditional festivals and a fascinating picture of the Palio takes all the front page; what is surprising is the total lack of information about such a festival, displaying an incoherent communication which disorients as the reader waits for something, namely a concrete way by which it is possible to participate to the events, to the festival promoted. No telephone number or references to other kind of promotional material are given; the only feeble trace is the address of a web page we navigated through without being able to catch useful information in order to take part in the Palio. Also the brochure presents vague information about the Palio. In fact, differently from what happens for information related to other cultural events, like for example, visiting museums, the lack of a telephone number to which making reference is evident and marked (p. 34).

The communicative strategies show the great value assigned to pictures. It is worthy that the majority of analyzed units are made up by both verbal and iconographic strategies (Figure 6); it seems to us like a way of making an echo between one another, showing the need for repetition that is typical in mass media where the multimodality marks the obsession of having reached the potential customer. This obsession is particularly evident in those pages of the brochure in which the iconographic messages are fractionized in micro pictures which recall each other, making an echo to the hypothesis of the representation circle (Jenkins, 2003).

To sum up, our results confirm Boorstin's theory about pseudo-events, implying that a resort plays on a front stage a sort of “packaged culture,” made ad hoc in order to fascinate tourists. The difference between cultural heritage and intimate culture promotion we have revealed shows an additional lecture of the Boorstinian framework, which makes an echo to the environmental bubble theory (Cohen, 1972), stressing the risk in terms of social and cultural identity tourism implies for both residents and tourists.

The particular front stage involves not only the way by which the resort defends itself but in addition the way by which it plays the relationship with the potential tourist to whom it calls for whenever it is possible, stressing a particular ability to respond to tourists' needs, in line with customer orientation which is particularly important in service sector (Bruno et al., 2017).

The current study is the first to propose the existence of a counter-environmental bubble, reading the relationship between residents and tourist along the different dimensions of culture, meant as both cultural heritage and intimate culture. Further analyses are needed to explore the strength of these evidences in other countries, especially considering the problem of external validity that every qualitative study shows. However, these findings appear promising in their power to suggest how to promote culture for tourists, supporting what we may call a socio-sustainable territorial marketing.

MC and DC: Have planned the study and written results discussion; MC: Has collected and analyzed the data.