Online visit opinions about attractions of the religious heritage: an argumentative approach

摘要

AbstractThousands of people every year travel to visit sites of cultural interests and a wide part of those sites belong to the Christian tradition. Tourism represents, indeed, an opportunity for the Church to announce its message and to promote moral and religious formation. Thanks to Web 2.0, then, travelers can easily share contents and voice their opinions online. The study presented in the article analyzed online travel reviews (OTR) about an attraction of the Christian heritage, with the goal of unveiling the arguments that formed the opinion of visitors. The article aims at giving two types of contribution to the body of knowledge about the relation among Church, communication and culture. On one side, it intends to bring the attention on tourism as a phenomenon, which discloses social and cultural dynamics of our time. On the other side, it gives a methodological contribution, by proposing a method to analyze OTR.