Ricerc@Sapienza

The contribution considers – among others - the socio-economic dimension of ten European
historical Capitals through the lens of @ - branding applied to the tourism sector.
Starting from Anderson’s Theory (1983) and continuing with the definitions and key concepts of
brand identity (Aaker, 1996) and brand image (Keller, 1998; Cai, 2002) for a destination’s
successful branding, here we propose a re-interpretation of “destination branding” (Morrison &
Anderson, 2002) in terms of “destination@-branding” by considering the city destination through

The objective of this contribution -included in the media studies of a wider research program initiated
by de Rosa in the 1980s- is to capture the “virtual brand image” of ten European historical Capitals
cities through the analysis of the commercial websites Booking.com and TripWolf. The city
destination through Internet has been considered not only as an object of perception but also, more
comprehensively, as an object of social representation. The descriptive results highlight – among