Conclusion
In the Rimini back region, certain local food & wine products serve as material expressions of what is otherwise an intangible cultural heritage. They literally and metaphorically feed new forms of tourist consumption. Local food & wine shops become interfaces between tourists, actors and place, and in so doing actively contribute to place branding. With reference to these sites, this study has proposed a theoretical interpretation and elaboration of how place branding emerge though a set of material, bodily and discursive performances, in line with the emerging perspective of performativity (Cohen & Cohen, 2012b). This implies a shift from a policy-driven logic of conceiving and studying place brands (Ren, 2011; Ren & Blichfeldt, 2011), consistent with views of tourist places as ‘‘constantly crossed by a potential to perform that emerges from the convergence of mundane practices and actions” (Giovanardi et al., 2014, p.113). ‘‘Things” also play a major role (Franklin & Crang, 2001; Ren, 2011; Sheller & Urry, 2006). Drawing on these insights, the case study illustrated how material, discursive, and embodied performances staged at local food & wine shops enact a selective thematisation of place, to which I refer to in this article as place branding. These performances might represent a frontier to be further explored, from where to arrive at theoretical and empirical implications.
