A life as a work of art: literary tourists’ motivations and experiences at il vittoriale degli italiani.

Abstract

Literary tourism is a complex cultural phenomenon which presents in a vari- ety of forms, showing its lively connections with past and contemporary culture and its ca- pacity to create experiences for different audiences. The aim of this paper that is based on a qualitative study is to investigate literary tourists’ motivations and experiences at Il Vittoriale degli Italiani (the Italian author Gabriele D’Annunzio’s last home). To achieve this aim, an evocative autoethographic method has been used, which allows an emphatically, emotional relationship between writers and readers. The findings suggest that literary tourism promotes an interactive relationship between readers, authors and places, besides contributing to the popularisation of high culture and, in a sense, the aestheticisation of everyday life. Addition- ally, this paper challenges the idea that the act of reading implies a temporal and ontological asymmetry between readers and writers as well as the link between the aestheticisation of life and art. It also provides a further definition of literary tourism, which emphasises the abil- ity of this type of tourism to merge words and images, thus turning language into spectacle and making the ordinary beautiful.