Abstract
Although the fundamental role of narratives in the pre-travel phase of tourism experiences is well established, limited research has examined their antecedents. In the tourism contexts, where multiple stakeholders with various interests and communication capabilities contribute to the development of destination narratives, understanding how coherent narratives emerge becomes particularly important. Drawing on the slow storytelling approach (Gasparin et al., 2022), this work-in-progress short paper investigates how visual and textual narratives in the agritourism sector are constructed and whether, and to what extent, they are developed coherently. The study adopts a qualitative multi-method approach, combining qualitative content analysis of selected agritourism Instagram accounts and webpage with semistructured interviews with those agritourism owners. In addition, the local agritourism organization, Gallo Rosso, is included in the analysis. Preliminary findings show that agritourism narratives prominently highlight agricultural activities, farm life, heritage, and sustainability, while strongly emphasizing family identity and the cyclical nature of time. Images represent the primary storytelling medium, while captions generally support and contextualize the visual content. Preliminary results also suggest a degree of narrative coherence across agritourism establishments, despite revealing different communication styles and relationships with Gallo Rosso. Moreover, the narratives communicated by individual agritourism structures resemble those promoted by Gallo Rosso. This study contributes to agritourism and destination marketing literature by adapting the slow storytelling approach to specific contexts and digital visual narratives. Further analysis of the interviews will provide deeper insights into the constraints and facilitators shaping the construction of coherent destination narratives.