Ostiense and Esquilino on Two Institutional Tourism Websites. Dominant Framings and Possible Reframings

This paper sets out to analyse the discursive identity and the main framings of the city of Rome in the English versions of two key institutional tourism websites, Italia.it and Turismoroma.it, with a focus on the two pilot neighbourhoods of the project «Roaming in Rome»: Ostiense-Garbatella and Esquilino. The visual and verbal features of selected sections of the two websites are examined through multimodal discourse analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001). Finally, drawing on Positive Discourse Analysis (Martin, 2004; Bartlett, 2012), a few examples of other possible stories that could be told about Rome are offered, ranging from international news articles to literary nonfiction works.