The Social Construction of Tuscany in the German- and English-Speaking World. Presented by the Analysis of Internet Images

The essay examines aspects of the social construction of Tuscany, with a focus on the German-speaking regions. This is contextualized in relation to the social construction of Tuscany in English and Italian. The basis of the investigation is a picture search with Google using the word Toscana in German, English, and Italian. The results of the German and English language search clearly point to the considerably different stereotyping of Tuscany in terms of landscape, while the images determined using the Italian version of the search word are clearly more commonplace and have a greater variation in content. The results refer to the complexity of the social construction of landscape in particular and space in general, which carries a great signifcance for the image, the touristic potential, the self-description of regions, and yet have only been scientifcally processed in rudimentary form.