The “Instagrammability” effect: a new mass tourism or a digital panacea? The case of bakeries in the Sicilian landscape

The effects of social media on marketing and business support sparked multidisciplinary interest and generated interdisciplinary collaborations for investigations on such a new form of digital culture. In particular, Instagram’s photographic communication can help tourists to insert themselves into the flow most suitable for personal experiences and expectations and, then, live the identity of the place. This phenomenon could lead to the so-called Instagrammability, which indicates a large scale appreciation and sharing through the appealing aesthetic of clusters of pictures. Although sharing photographs could favour including places otherwise out of tourist choice in the destination circuit, some critical issues could be solved. In the most extreme cases, we witness an authentic reconstruction of the destination, configuring a digital landscape that does not necessarily correspond to the place identity. The present work focused on the relationship between bakeries (i.e., American pastries-type businesses with specific dishes and visual aesthetic choices) and the city of Catania as an example of local identity strongly connected to culinary tradition. More precisely, it will highlight two cases of bakeries whose web reputation is firmly related to post sharing on Instagram to analyze how such photo sharing impacted the city’s gastronomic reputation.