Perception or perspective? Adjusting the representation of Italy and the UK for the tourist: the Made in Italy and This is Great Britain campaigns

The OED defines perspective as “the aspect of a subject or matter, as perceived from a particular mental point of view”, while perception is “the process of becoming aware or conscious of a thing or things in general”. As far as I know, in linguistic terms, we only have a definition of the latter: perception is ‘everything we can be aware of’ and refers to experiences and how things appear to us: perception is what Lakoff and Johnson (1999: p. 103) call the embodiment of concepts. If we apply these two concepts to tourism, we can see that tourist perceptions of a destination overlap with the concept of perspective to such an extent that language reconstructs, reassembles and shapes the (unknown) destination to form a stereotype. In this way, the discourse of tourism enhances both a ‘strangehood’ approach and an impression of authenticity (Dann 1996), describing what is native and typical of a destination. This authenticity, however, is fictitious, because the real destination has been greatly manipulated: the location is reduced to simply offering a few attractions of an almost semiotic and symbolic nature. What happens when the destination is a well-known country, such as the UK or Italy, when no cultural clash is expected and the tourist does not envisage the presence of any form of exoticism1? In these cases, does the perception of perspective prevail in tourist campaigns? An analysis of the Made in Italy and This is Great Britain campaigns reveals the co-occurrence of overlapping multimodal strategies where interwoven texts and images offer amplified meanings.