Profile and behaviors of cultural tourists. Evidence from Italy

The purpose of this paper is to describe how actual tourists experience a cultural city. New trends in cultural consumption suggest that tourists are looking for a holistic experience, which means that cultural city may be experienced in many different ways. In particular, the goal of the paper is twofold:1) the first goal is to identify the socio-demographic characteristics and behavior of tourists in a cultural city;2) the second goal is to understand the main positive and negative aspects of their visiting experience. The study adopts a quantitative method and descriptive statistics and content analysis. In particular, a sample of 300 tourists of Urbino were interviewed in the period July-September 2019. Urbino was selected as it represents an interesting art Renaissance city, a UNESCO site with the Ducal Palace, one of the most wonderful palace in the world which hosts a collection of key Italian artists. The study stresses that the main positive aspects of the visiting experience are the good state of conservation of the city, the beauty of arts and monuments and the atmosphere of a small, quiet, medieval, renaissance and university city, while among negative aspects are the “up and down” and the expensive and scarce car parking areas. Furthermore, this study highlights some managerial implications and future research directions.