Guidebooks and Travel Stories Interpretations and emotional reactions

On the face of it, guidebooks and travel stories are two different resources. The former are published to give travellers verified factual information. The latter are the work of poets and writers who have gone on a journey, and who draw freely from history, facts and events to describe their feelings about a particular work of art, rather than its place in world history and culture. However, guidebooks and travel stories both place themselves between the tourist and a tourist sight to provide the required explanations, and then end up steering the sightseeing visit. These resources are extremely important for visitors, who use them to prepare the trip and during the journey, and later to remember the trip once they have returned home. They orient the deepest feelings of the user, who is led to relive the feelings experienced by writers of travel stories and professional guidebook authors. This paper examines a particular aspect of the tourist experience – the tourist gaze, which can develop, in some pathological conditions, into a tourist syndrome such as Stendhal syndrome in Florence, Jerusalem syndrome and those brought on by other holy places, and Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto.