La comunicazione turistica plurilingue: il Progetto “Museo poliglotta"

Tourism communication, especially since the digital turn, has registered several attempts toopen to new forms of multilingualism. For instance, the traditional multilingual experience of-fered by guided tours and audio guides has now been enhanced by social networking tools. Recent research points to the need of interdisciplinary work at the crossroads of linguistics, media sciences and museum studies to investigate communication strategies and linguistic de-vices by means of which an international audience of tourists can be addressed and get involved in museums in the digital age.The present paper illustrates the first findings of the project “Museo poliglotta”, a project run by two universities in the Italian towns of Bergamo and Bre-scia in cooperation with local museums with the goal of producing digital multilingual contents for international museum visitors. The empirical part of the paper describes a workshop activity in which students developed Instagram reels in Italian, German and English on the figure of the well-known Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti.A number of observations lead to the conclu-sion that synergies between language research and foreign language teaching on the one hand and museum institutions on the other can bring about important benefits for all parties involved, in particular the possibility to offer professionalising training in the academic world and stimuli to innovate and improve multilingual communication in the museum sector.