Conclusioni

Abstract

Segmentation, classification, rearticulation. This is the mental process that guides the activity of the semiotician when confronted with an object of meaning. Whether measured against a verbal text, such as a newspaper article or a novel, against a visual text, such as a painting or a photograph, or against a space, an object of use, the typical dish of a regional cuisine or any other kind of artifact, the path is always the same and involves, more or less explicitly, these three steps. The reason is simple, although it may seem to contradict common knowledge: meaning is not something mysterious, complex to decipher and therefore understandable only by a few, it is always already there, for everyone, well present to everyone. It is the product of an experience so "natural" (the adjective is Greimas') and immediate that one might think it is no problem and deserves no special attention. This is what happens with language, we know, so ingrained in us that it is difficult even to perceive the extraordinary and complex machine that it is, unless we make the effort to distance ourselves from it, perhaps comparing the one we were educated fm as children with another. This is what happens with tourism