Cultural Goods, Motivations and Consumer Behaviour.

There is wide theoretical consensus on the fact that present-day urban economic development is largely culture-led. This means that cities are special places for the production and consumption of symbolic goods. Urban economic performance depends on the administrative competence of local policy-makers to organize creative resources, talents and cultural images. Cities are cultural clusters, requiring closer attention to the factors that foster co-operative processes, the development of cultural activities and cultural consumption patterns. In this paper we focus on the last process. The motivations and expectations of cultural consumers are crucial elements for understanding the efficacy of the urban supply of cultural goods. Our empirical study, based on a sample of visitors to the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, first describes the visitor features of an artistic good and then investigates the emotional-cognitive content of the visit itself.