‘Domani a quest’ora potresti essere qui’: multimodal practices for representing temporality in destination advertising

Materiality, mediality, locality and temporality are constitutive characteristics of texts. Various texts in mediatized everyday reality show temporal aspects that influence their perception and their functions in different ways. The present article considers diverse expressions of temporality in destination ads, a genre that is hitherto underexplored. A special focus is put on multimodal practices that express temporal aspects, for instance the timeline of pre-, on- and post-trip time, vacation time as desired time, the situationality of ads, etc. The author uses multimodal discourse analysis to examine the interplay of semiotic resources in destination ads and to describe their compositional, ideational and interactional metafunctions. The analysis shows that text–image relations are crucial for the depiction of temporality and time-boundedness, and also for the formation of a specific tourist gaze that is centred on the desire to fully enjoy vacation time.