Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Trespassing — Sidecar

The influential Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg – once described by Perry Anderson as ‘the outstanding European historian of the generation which came of age in the late Sixties’ – passed away in Bologna last month at the age of eighty-seven. He had been ailing for some months, and was no longer able to leave his home, but still made an appearance via Zoom at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome in late May, for a conference on Marc Bloch that he helped to organize. Ginzburg remained intellectually active through his months of illness and published a last collection of his essays entitled Il vincolo della vergogna: Letture oblique in late 2025. Not long after I received a copy of the book from Adelphi, Ginzburg’s regular publisher of later years, he sent a mortified email informing me of a ‘correction to a dreadful mistake which defaces my book’, namely a lapse of concentration that had led him to make a small and rather obvious factual error about Joseph de Maistre. It was of little help to try and console the perfectionist historian with a reference to Horace’s adage about how even Homer nods. This punctiliousness was among the varied aspects of Carlo’s personality that were recalled at a crowded noonday memorial held at one of his favourite locations in Bologna, the Archiginnasio Municipal Library off the Piazza Maggiore, where he was remembered as a thinker and researcher, an active citizen, a patron of learning, a teacher and a friend. In keeping with his family’s secular traditions, he was buried the same day at a private ceremony (including his wife and two daughters) at Bologna’s famous Certosa cemetery.

At the memorial, it was recalled that he came from one of Italy’s most celebrated progressive intellectual families, which meant that he had spent much of his adult life in the public eye. His mother, Natalia Ginzburg (née Levi), was a writer of fiction and memoirs, whose books like Lessico famigliare (Family Sayings) are still on the bookshelves of many households in Italy and elsewhere. Ginzburg liked to joke that even the butcher on Via Oberdan, near his home, could quote anecdotes from his mother’s memoirs. His father, Leone Ginzburg, who migrated to Italy from Odessa, was a literary scholar, philologist and translator from Russian into Italian, who helped found a famous publishing house, Einaudi, in Turin. After joining the anti-Nazi resistance, he was arrested and killed in a Roman prison in February 1944. Carlo was barely five years old and had already experienced a period of ‘internal exile’ in the Abruzzi with his younger brother and sister which marked him for life, and to which he would return in his writing and lectures in later years. Nevertheless, as an intensely private person, he steadfastly refused the idea of writing his own memoirs or giving away more of himself to strangers than he had to, even in the many interviews he gave over the years.

Carlo’s childhood was obviously heavily influenced by his mother, who shaped his early literary tastes, and left him with a lasting affection not only for the great figures of Italian literature, but for authors like Kafka and Proust. Through her, and his stepfather Gabriele Baldini, he came to have a personal acquaintance with many important cultural figures of the time, such as Benedetto Croce and Italo Calvino; he recalled once accompanying his mother to the Cinecittà Studios in Rome to meet a young Fellini. Carlo was tempted by a literary career, and also an artistic one. Though he was later dismissive of his talents, the recent rediscovery of some of his early sketches (many of them portraits of his brother Andrea) suggests that he had a real gift for drawing. A decisive moment came when he joined the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he had as a contemporary the great historian of European religious life Adriano Prosperi, who became a lifelong friend and periodic collaborator. Here he also came into contact with Delio Cantimori, a figure who is largely forgotten today, but who had worked on early modern Italian heretics and so-called Nicodemites. Cantimori had been an adherent of the Fascist movement, so the relationship cannot have been a simple one. Nevertheless, Carlo always recognized his debt to Cantimori for at least two reasons: for having introduced him to the work of Marc Bloch (especially his Les rois thaumaturges); and for his insistence on ‘slow reading’, the process by which one could spend a whole two-hour seminar closely analysing a page or even half a page of a text in all its nuances and subtleties. Carlo came to believe as a result that at the heart of history was sound philological practice, with philology defined in a very ample sense, influenced in his case by Erich Auerbach.

However, Carlo did not want to be a simple disciple of Cantimori, who was attached to a traditional style of intellectual history, albeit with a philosophical bent. Rather he was interested in popular culture, and in exploring the new insights that anthropologists like Ernesto de Martino were bringing to the study of daily life, both in Italy and elsewhere. This led him to his first important project on the so-called benandanti of the Friuli region of northeastern Italy, who believed they had supernatural powers that helped protect their crops against malevolent influences. They were members of the agrarian community who were chosen and distinguished by the fact that they had been born with a ‘caul’, or an embryonic membrane. Rather than dismissing such views as popular superstition or foolish irrationality, as some left analysts of peasant life might have done, Carlo undertook a fine-grained reading of such beliefs using the records of the Inquisition, which had wanted to stamp out such heterodox tendencies. He published I Benandanti (The Night Battles) in 1966; it had some impact in Italian historical circles, but not much beyond them. Around the same time, Carlo joined together with a handful of other Italian historians to take over the journal Quaderni storici and also launched the programmatic idea of a new approach that would be called ‘microhistory’ (microstoria) some years later. The initial figures in the enterprise, besides Carlo, were his childhood friend Giovanni Levi, Edoardo Grendi and Carlo Poni, and they were later joined by one of Levi’s students Simona Cerutti. Accounts of how the term ‘microhistory’ emerged are somewhat contradictory, but it seems that Grendi’s role was crucial, though he never sought out the limelight and is best known now as a historian of Genoese merchants. A light-hearted remark of Grendi, that their business was the study of the ‘exceptional normal’, was adopted as a kind of ironic credo by the group.

As is well known, Carlo’s career as a historian took a decisive turn with the publication of The Cheese and the Worms (1976). Based, like his earlier work, on a close reading of Inquisition records from the Friuli region, this slim book explored the mental world of a sixteenth-century miller called Domenico Scandella (d. 1599), known by his nickname ‘Menocchio’. Despite his modest social origins, Menocchio was literate and able to mobilize unexpected cultural resources while creating his own imaginative cosmogonic vision, which was at odds with the orthodoxy of the Catholic church. This led to his being investigated and eventually burnt at stake, but not before he had shared many startling thoughts with the Inquisitors. At the time of its appearance, the book was compared with Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou (1975) also based on Inquisition records, notably in a review by Christopher Hill. Despite some superficial similarities, the comparison is not entirely to Le Roy Ladurie’s advantage; Carlo’s philological practice and understanding of context was far more rigorous. Within a few years, The Cheese and the Worms had been widely translated, attaining the status of a modern classic. Even Fernand Braudel was stirred to write a letter to Carlo’s publisher, warmly complimenting the work and assuring them of his support for a French translation. Carlo himself became more and more visible not only in Europe, but in the English-speaking world, especially the United States, where he had presented an early version of The Cheese and the Worms in 1973. A series of American visiting positions eventually led to him being offered a chaired professorship at UCLA in 1988, where he remained (sometimes part-time) until 2006, before returning in the last years of his teaching career to the Scuola Normale in Pisa. At UCLA, he developed close friendships with a diverse set of scholars such as Anderson and Saul Friedländer, despite the fact that the latter two disagreed on many subjects, especially the Palestine-Israel conflict.

In the years after 1988, Carlo produced one more major monograph, entitled Storia notturna (Ecstasies in English), a sprawling work that covers similar themes to the earlier books, but with the morphological and trans-historical elements pushed much further. While demonstrating the vast erudition that readers had come to expect from Carlo, the overall argument proved difficult to follow and the book was judged nearly impenetrable by many. In a critical review essay that appeared in the London Review of Books in November 1990, Anderson suggested that the change (or evolution) of approach between the 1976 work and that of 1989 had not been helpful either to the author or readers; in his view, the net effect was a work that had managed to ‘overshoot its resources’ by its constant resort to forms of ‘polythetic classification’. A vigorous exchange between Ginzburg and Anderson followed in the LRB’s letters pages.

The reception of Storia notturna was obviously a disappointment to Carlo, and it marked a turning point in his chief mode of expression. After 1990, he mostly turned to writing essays on an astonishing diversity of topics, which were then published in thematic collections such as Threads and Traces (2012) and Nevertheless (2018), exploring a number of early modern and modern authors, ranging from Machiavelli, Montaigne and Pascal to Freud, Mauss, Bloch and Auerbach. From the 1990s, he became less a social and cultural historian and more an intellectual historian, one of whose main preoccupations was to explore his own intellectual predecessors and ancestors and consider the possibilities and limitations of interdisciplinary thinking. One of his preferred areas of ‘trespassing’ was art history, and he wrote on a variety of painters from Piero della Francesca to Jacques-Louis David, not always to the approval of the professional art historians. Some of his tastes in the social sciences eventually became unfashionable, such as his obstinate loyalty towards French structuralism and Claude Lévi-Strauss, who he often said was the perfect ‘devil’s advocate’ for the historian. Reflecting the influence of his father Leone, he continued to delve deeply into the Russian tradition of narratological analysis, and was a particularly enthusiastic reader of Bakhtin.

Though he never joined any party, in the 1990s Carlo ventured into some explicitly political projects, such as his defence of his radical friend and colleague Adriano Sofri, accused in the killing of a prominent Italian magistrate in the early 1970s. The book that he wrote on the case, The Judge and the Historian (1991), earned him both admirers and some enemies, including amongst the erstwhile friends of his youth. He later described the book as a ‘failure’ in the sense that it did not persuade the judges or overturn Sofri’s conviction. It showed however that Carlo was never afraid to put his reputation on the line to take an unpopular position. His students would recall that when he dined years later in restaurants in Pisa or Siena, the kitchen staff (who had once belonged to organizations like Lotta Continua) would emerge to salute him and express their thanks for what he had done for Sofri’s cause.

Carlo was also progressively drawn into a very different kind of public debate, one regarding the nature of proof and historical method that had begun to take up a prominent place on American campuses, especially under the influence of Hayden White. Arriving in UCLA from Europe, Carlo was apparently somewhat taken aback by the popularity of what he termed the ‘neo-sceptical’ position among graduate students in the History Department, where White had taught. As he later reflected in an interview:

‘In 1990, Hayden White, the author of well-known works on historical methodology, gave a lecture at UCLA in which he presented his neo-sceptical thesis that there is no rigorous difference between fictional narratives and historical narratives, since they both rely upon the use of rhetoric. I was in the audience (I had been teaching at UCLA for a year) and I intervened. White’s arguments seemed to me to be untenable and dangerous because they prevented the refutation of the thesis of so-called “negationists”, such as Robert Faurisson, according to whom the extermination of the Jews never happened. A civil but bitter clash ensued.’

After a first riposte in a volume edited by Friedländer, Carlo returned to the charge in a set of lectures that were published in 1999 as History, Rhetoric and Proof, where he provided a more elaborate counter-argument against the Nietzschean tradition (to which he argued White belonged). Yet even if this work was not a ‘failure’ in the sense of that on the Sofri case, it failed to persuade many adherents of White’s position, who caricatured Carlo’s view as that of a ‘positivist’. This was despite the fact that White himself utterly failed to rise to the challenge of the debate. In an interview in the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, White went so far as to declare: ‘Ginzburg himself, a very cultured man, who has a conception of historical truth that is profoundly biblical and who makes appeals to historical truth, has written things that are pure fantasy, like The Cheese and the Worms, a book that denies being any sort of fiction and presents itself as a historical text but is in reality a fantastical story, constructed on the basis of just two pages of Inquisition documents’. White’s philological credentials were thus not adequate to allow the argument to be fruitful, and by the 2010s, the matter had become something of a dialogue of the deaf, though it continued to be taught on campuses.

Anderson noted in a later essay devoted to Carlo’s work that ‘Ginzburg dislikes labels of every kind, and evades any ready capture by them’. Walking with him once in the streets of Turin, where he was born, I asked Carlo if he felt any identification with the city, a suggestion that he immediately repudiated. At his memorial, three places in Italy came forward to claim him: Bologna, where he had taught early in his career and to which he retired; the small town in the Abruzzi where he had sheltered as a child; and Montereale Valcellina, where Menocchio had lived. Yet, in one of his later texts, which gave the title to his final book, this is what he wrote: ‘the country we really belong to is not, as rhetoric would have it, the one we love, but the one we are ashamed of, or can be ashamed of’. It was a way for him to affirm that as an Italian of secular Jewish heritage, he refused to let his identity override his critical faculties. Whether or not one agreed with Carlo Ginzburg, one can only admire the cutting intelligence he brought to every question he addressed.

Read on: Carlo Ginzburg, ‘The Bond of Shame’, NLR 120.