Nowadays, the spread of deceptive reviews is a problem that has reached critical dimensions, having a significant economic impact on business activities. This paper aims to estimate – at the quantitative and qualitative levels – the possibility of using particular words to disambiguate between truthful and deceptive text, focusing on reviews produced in the cultural heritage domain. For this purpose, a lexicon-based methodology has used two different lexicons: sentiment information, intensifiers, downtoners, and negation operators. As known in the literature, these elements are crucial in a classification process related to deceptiveness. The evaluation phase has considered quantitative metrics such as accuracy and F1 score and ad hoc developed metrics that consider specific linguistic parameters such as polarity and tone of voice intensifiers. A qualitative analysis of a subset of the corpus has also been carried out to understand better factors that impact the classification of deceptive review. Several linguistic features have been considered, ranging from the number of intensifiers to their type and position in phrases and sentences. A comparison between the performances of two different lexicons used has been added to the analysis. •Lexicon-based approach for classifying Italian fake Cultural Heritage reviews.•A methodology based on intensifiers and downtoners from sentiment analysis.•New Italian Cultural Heritage Corpus for Deceptive Reviews Classification.•Comparison of manual and automatically created lexicons.•New metric considering polarity and linguistic features.