The present study aims at identifying the Italian and Anglo-American tourist gaze upon
London, i.e. to show how London – one of the world’smost visited destinations – is perceived
and described through language by Italian and Anglo-American tourists. To this
purpose, a corpus of Italian and English travel blogs was created and used. The creation
of a word frequency list of both corpora allowed us to identify four semantic categories of
words – landmark sights/attractions; natural environment; food & drinks; andmeans of
transport – corresponding to the different “faces” of London seen by the tourists. For each
category, themost frequent and functional words (or groups of words) were considered
and analysed to see how they are represented by the tourists of both cultures. The Italian
and Anglo-American tourist gaze upon London were then compared and contrasted. The
findings suggest that the differences between the two gazes find reason in different cultural
backgrounds.
