Itinerari della fede in Sicilia, con un’analisi della comunicazione online

Itineraries of Faith in Sicily. With an analysis of the online communication - Facing the ongoing strong growth of religious tourism, the Sicilian Region has funded the development of diverse religious itineraries, aiming at offering new tourism opportunities. These itineraries encompass places already popular within other kinds of tourists, gathering them along dedicated routes embracing sacred places, sanctuaries, ceremonies, celebrations and traditional rituals. This paper aims at analyzing the tourist experience of travelers, tourists and pilgrims through the detection of the traces of their experiences they left online, namely on the Internet. Travelers while using web tools are actually building relationships with actors of tourism, telling the value of destinations to their social networks, providing the key for interpreting the travel experience and tourist product. Doing this, they actually provide a way for identifying effective tools for interpreting the practical components of the tourism activity, thus contributing to the co-creation of final products. A sound consideration of even few qualitative elements, i.e. the small-data interpreting, becomes crucial to activate the co-creation processes, allowing tourist operators to design the proper tourist product, by managing the whole marketing strategy, and not only defining promotional goals of tourist destinations and products.