Gazing without risks. How to experience Italy, in the tourism industry interpretation of the film The Great Beauty

Abstract

This paper explores how Italian heritage is presented through the narrative and stylistic features of the Academy Award winner film The Great Beauty by Paolo Sorrentino (2013), and which ‘Italianness’ is therein identified by the tourism industry. After tracing some arguments of the national debate on the film, I analyze the official online tourism marketing pages set up by public bodies and the movie tour proposals offered by tour operators on their websites. This shows that film tourism in relation to The Great Beauty is understood as an alternative form of urban heritage tourism. The authenticity of this tourist experience is identified in the originality of the chosen landmarks and points of view, thus adopting the meta-tourist reading suggested by the film. To be rejected is its narrative and emotional troubled universe, which finds little space in the design of the experience, in countertrend with most movie tour proposals.