In which city does Jorge Luis Borges's short story 'The Aleph' take place?

Jorge Luis Borges's short story The Aleph takes place in Buenos Aires. The city provides the story's recognizable urban setting as the narrator visits the home of Beatriz Viterbo's cousin, Carlos Argentino Daneri.

First published in 1945, the story follows Borges's fictionalized narrator as he mourns Beatriz and continues visiting her family after her death. Daneri claims that a point in the cellar contains every place in the universe at once. When the narrator finally sees it, the story shifts from an apparently personal rivalry into a meditation on infinity, memory, perception, and the limits of language.

Buenos Aires matters because Borges anchors the impossible vision in an ordinary, specific city. The familiar house, street life, literary ambitions, and social rituals contrast with the Aleph's cosmic scale. That tension between everyday reality and metaphysical wonder is central to Borges's fiction.

The story first appeared in the Argentine literary magazine Sur in September 1945 and was later included in the 1949 collection The Aleph and Other Stories. Readers sometimes confuse the story's setting with its universal subject: the Aleph may contain the whole cosmos, but the narrative itself begins in Buenos Aires.