Scalar narratives and intimate identities in Northern Italian historical cafes

Abstract

The potential that narratives have to transport storytellers and audience members across time and space has made them fertile sites to study spatiotemporal and scalar effects. Through a linguistic anthropological analysis of a corpus of narratives from interviews conducted with executives of Northern Italian historical cafes (2011–2022), I examine how collective, intimate identities are (co)constructed and negotiated through the stances that these executives take vis-à-vis both the historical and the contemporary artistic uniqueness of their cafes. In this respect, the notions of scale and chronotope, and the way they intersect in executives’ stories, become prominent. Furthermore, although historical cafes have rarely been studied from a linguistic anthropological perspective, they have been key social spaces where individuals meet and interact on a daily basis while consuming their beverages and/or small meals, in many European countries, across centuries. This article thus bridges recent research on the Bakhtinian chronotope with a multiscalar approach, as applied to storytelling practices.