In recent years, cutting-edge information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been implemented at different scales in order to improve tourists’ experiences of cultural heritage. In particular, advanced technologies combining augmented reality can offer a deeply immersive visitor’s experience aiming both at providing multifaceted information about the site and enhancing the attractiveness of a tourist destination at the different scales. Thus, the study aims at critically scrutinising the intersection of AR and tourist practices through the analysis of tourism destination stakeholders’ perceived value of AR solutions. The aim is to understand how it is crucial to take into account stakeholders’ perceptions about cutting-edge technology development, apart from providing practical implications for industry practitioners and local institutional actors. From the methodological standpoint, the article is based on a multi-method approach encompassing field-work observation, in addition to a stakeholder and case study approach, aiming at evaluating internal and external stakeholders’ perceived value through a qualitative perspective based on semi-structured interviews with institutional actors, entrepreneurs, visitors and local community representatives. The results suggested some critical reflections about the inherent elusiveness of technological innovation in the case it is not incorporated in a long-term sustainable vision.

In recent years, tourist destinations and strategies of place branding have been facing new challenges owing to the diffusion of Information and Communications technologies. Smart devices can give tourists/prosumers the possibility to co-create and share their travel experience to the point to influence the destination web reputation and, consequently, its digital place image and branding. Furthermore, new technologies can be also used as effective analytical tools to scrutinize the role of online co-created narratives in influencing the web reputation of a specific tourist site, natural heritage included. The study focuses on the online destination image of Mount Etna, an active volcano located in Southern Italy inserted in the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2017. The web reputation of this natural heritage site has been analyzed through a twofold methodology: a manual online content analysis and a software-based Sentiment Analysis methodology. The paper highlights the crucial role of new technologies both as tools of analysis in tourism and heritage studies and as “catalysts” of e-narratives able to influence place images. In so doing, the research aims at providing other researchers and policy-makers with new theoretical and methodological insights about the challenges and potentialities of smart technologies in exploring the online place image, thus contributing to a novel conceptualization of place branding through the theoretical/operational framework of Place Branding 3.0. In particular, the mixed-method approach represents an innovative framework insofar as it provides an in-depth evaluation of users’ online perceptions both at the “micro” scale—at the level of contents, through the manual content analysis—as well as at the “macro” scale, thanks to the software-based Sentiment Analysis methodology.

This article provides new insights into the relationship between industrialization and new forms of post-industrial development. Adopting a historical sensibility, it frames the contemporary development of the local economy of the city of Siracusa, in south-east Sicily, in an evolutionary historical perspective. The article focuses on the recent process of touristification of the city and surrounding area, analysing this process in connection with the industrialization and growth-pole strategy implemented in south-east Sicily in the post-war period. Emphasis is placed on the narratives that have been mobilized to justify different forms of development in the area, focusing in particular on the recurrent representation of the area as a periphery. Pointing out the selective use of visions of the past in post-industrial development strategies, the authors highlight how an uncomfortable industrial past has been removed from the main narratives to envision the city of Siracusa as moving towards a new phase of capitalist development. Finally, the article provides novel insights into the critical literature on tourism, showing that tourism, narrated and promoted as a sustainable and eco-compatible alternative to industrialization in Siracusa, can in fact produce highly negative impacts on the local environment and communities.

This paper aims at scrutinizing the role of two overlapping dimensions in tourism geography teaching and learning: the real-world perspective, represented by the fieldwork as a long-established practice in geographical teaching; and the digital sphere, namely the use of visual methodologies and social media as tools to activate city image-making in tourist practices. In particular, the work deepens critical aspects and potentialities of a mixed-method approach combining both traditional methods and more innovative tools to carry out researches and teaching in the field of tourism geography and cultural heritage. Theoretically inserted at the interplay among tourism, digital geography and visual methods, it draws on a series of workshops organized with third-level students between 2016 and 2018. Although problematizing some crucial conceptual issues related to the role of visualities and new technologies, findings highlight the didactic effectiveness of mixed methods that entail the more traditional ones such as team working and fieldworks, and the most innovative such as visual methods and social media, to increase students' interest in geography learning and stimulating their own perceptions of ordinary landscapes through a gaze repositioning.

In recent years, several policies have increasingly considered smart technologies as a potential solution to overcome territorial marginality in rural areas, where digitalization and smart innovation could help local communities address challenges such as depopulation and socio-economic deprivation. At the European scale, the Smart Village Action was launched in 2017 to address the so-called "circle of decline", showing to what extent rural smartness has been recently gaining momentum in transnational cohesion policies. This work aims to critically explore the Smart Village paradigm as a recently-emerged policy framework in rural, cohesion and/or recovery policies, investigating if and how it is variously (re)interpreted in policies and operationally applied in projects. From a methodological point of view, a qualitative policy document analysis (QPDA) and software-based content analysis were carried out on UE official documents, offering new theoretical insights and operational recommendations for understanding the concept of smartness beyond urban-centered perspectives.