{"id":418779,"date":"2026-07-03T09:18:55","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T07:18:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cookinc.it\/?p=418779"},"modified":"2026-07-03T10:04:38","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T08:04:38","slug":"the-epic-of-the-bar-sport","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cookinc.it\/en\/2026\/07\/03\/the-epic-of-the-bar-sport\/","title":{"rendered":"The Epic of the \u201cBar Sport\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

\u201cWho built seven-gated Thebes?\u201d asks the worker in Bertolt Brecht<\/strong>\u2019s celebrated poem. With that simple question, Brecht shifts the historian\u2019s gaze towards those long relegated to the margins of history: slaves, labourers, sailors, peasants \u2013 the forgotten, the invisible. In the preface to The Cheese and the Worms<\/em> (The Cheese and the Worms, first published in 1976), the historian Carlo Ginzburg<\/strong> observes that \u201cthe existence of cultural inequalities within so-called civilised societies is the very premise of the disciplines that have variously been called folklore, the study of popular traditions, or European ethnology. Yet the use of the word \u2018culture\u2019 to describe the complex of attitudes, beliefs, codes of behaviour and other practices characteristic of the subordinate classes in a given historical period is relatively recent, having been borrowed from cultural anthropology.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Italian history, there is one place where the \u201ccultural inequalities\u201d described by Carlo Ginzburg gave rise to a vibrant, layered social space in which the socioeconomic differences of countless generations converged and collided, creating a kind of philosophy of social role reversal. It is the carnivalesque envisioned by the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin: a place where everyone sheds the complex identities shaped by social conventions and meets others simply as fellow human beings, regardless of who they are. That place is the Bar Sport<\/strong><\/mark>. The term encompasses countless variations of a social institution that evolved alongside modern Italian society, yet its collective image remains firmly rooted in the bourgeois Italy of the post-war economic boom. Coffee, vermouth, wine and bitters fuelled endless conversations about politics, football and the football pools, heated arguments over cards or billiards, all unfolding within what was perhaps the only truly popular agora Italy has ever known.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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To trace the profile of the Bar Sport as a uniquely Italian cultural institution \u2013 one that reflects a people notoriously resistant to neat definitions \u2013 we must turn to unconventional sources. Traditional fields of inquiry such as history and sociology have rarely regarded the neighbourhood bar as a lens through which to observe a society in transition. Yet, as we shall see, the community gathered around the counter offers, in retrospect, a remarkably faithful snapshot of the anthropological shifts that have shaped Italy’s countless local communities. Artists, however, have always recognised the bar\u2019s narrative power.<\/strong> The rich cast of characters who have filled the tables and bars of taverns and caf\u00e9s has long provided an inexhaustible source of inspiration. It is precisely by drawing on literature, cinema and the other creative arts that we can attempt to reconstruct an epic of the bar, and in doing so reclaim its importance as a social institution; a role that today has largely been taken over by other spaces of conviviality, not least the diverse world of food and wine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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