Témoignages de voyageurs québécois sur le patrimoine artistique et culturel de la ville de Bologne dans l'application web touristique UniVOCIttà

Since the early 1990s, cultural tourism has evolved to meet the new needs of modern travelers, shifting toward immersive experiences in which tourists actively participate in the discovery of culture. In this context, literature emerges as a powerful tool for the tourism valorization of a territory in the digital age. This study presents one component of the UniVOCIttà research project (UniVOCIté. Digital voices on the uniqueness of Bolognese heritage), which aims to enhance the artistic, cultural, and natural heritage of the city of Bologna and its surrounding areas through a multilingual corpus of travel narratives written by foreign visitors from the past. We present the French corpus and the Quebec sub-corpus, which currently brings together texts written between the 19th and the 21st centuries by nine visitors from Quebec, united by a sense of wonder and admiration and a desire to discover Bologna’s artistic, religious, and cultural heritage. Through the analysis of these testimonies, we explore their unique perspectives and show how integrating these texts into a georeferenced itinerary on the UniVOCIttà mobile web application fosters intercultural dialogue between North American visitors and Bolognese residents, and more broadly Italians, by inviting them to rediscover their own heritage through a foreign gaze.