aau/MüllerNicoletta Apolito is a communication scholar and doctoral researcher at the Centro Studi Interculturali dell’Università di Verona. Her work is rooted in a region that is home to just under one million people, yet welcomes around three million tourists every year. For her doctoral thesis, she interviewed cultural tourism workers in Verona and its surrounding region, asking them about their intercultural experiences and the challenges they encounter in their work. To help develop an appropriate adult education programme on this basis, Nicoletta Apolito has spent the past seven months as a visiting researcher at the Department of Educational Science at the University of Klagenfurt.

“When guides show their city and region to people from many different countries, with very different needs and often high expectations, it becomes clear how important intercultural competence and a professional approach to diversity are,” explains Nicoletta Apolito. In recent years, she has examined how cultural tourism workers perceive their work. Her research work combined a comprehensive analysis of the available online material with a qualitative digital survey and interviews. The data gave the communication scholar insights into a demanding professional environment: “Cultural tourism workers have to manage diversity and intercultural encounters on many different levels. In Italy, for example, we are used to communicating with gestures and sometimes we touch the person we are speaking to. In many cultures, this is handled very differently. In this setting, even a facial expression can sometimes cause irritation. At heavily visited tourist sites, there can also be challenges for people who use wheelchairs or visually impaired visitors; this is another aspect of diversity to which these workers have to respond quickly and competently. What we also see, however, is that especially guides are often well organised among themselves and coordinate their work effectively. Additional difficulties tend to arise only when unlicensed operators are also active.” According to Nicoletta Apolito, what all cultural tourism workers have in common is that they need to respond to new situations in a friendly, sometimes de-escalating, and always flexible manner.
Cultural tourism workers often act as mediators and interpreters. Nicoletta Apolito gives the example of Juliet’s balcony at the Casa di Giulietta in Verona: “Although the story of Romeo and Juliet is fictional, the site attracts thousands of visitors every day. When visitors travel from far away with high expectations and then learn that the attraction is a modern-day myth, emotions can run high. Some even feel deceived. Guides have to deal professionally with these feelings, which are based on a misunderstanding, even though they have not been trained for this.” These observations point to specific needs in the training and professional development of cultural tourism workers.
This is where the adult education expertise at the University of Klagenfurt became relevant to Nicoletta Apolito’s research. In November 2025, she came to the Department of Educational Science in Klagenfurt for seven months to work on a model or framework for the professional training of cultural tourism workers in intercultural competence. This work has to take a number of constraints into account: the target group usually has little time to attend scheduled courses. Nicoletta Apolito summarises: “It soon became clear that a book or practical guide would be a good way to help them understand how appropriately they are already acting in many situations, and where there is further potential for improvement. I already have an idea for this tool in mind, and the past few months have helped me to lay the groundwork with an appropriate model.” In mid-May, Nicoletta Apolito returns to Verona, where she will continue her work. She plans to complete her doctoral project in the autumn of 2026.
Der Beitrag Intercultural skills in demand among cultural tourism workers erschien zuerst auf University of Klagenfurt.