Images and words contribute to defining a tourist destination. Destinations are described both by promotional and organic sources. The narrative structures built by this mix of sources, synchronically and diachronically animate the discourse about places, defining - and being influenced by - tourist behaviour. Focusing on the U.S. market, and using a semiotic approach to a corpus of "travel writings", combined with quantitative and qualitative market research, the study here presented shows how, even for a world-famous destination like Venice, only a few texts provided the main features of the destination image, and these same texts are still influencing it centuries afterwards.