Carlo Ginzburg (1939 – 2026)

Their Story

Carlo Ginzburg was born in Turin on April 15, 1939, the son of anti-fascist intellectual Leone Ginzburg—persecuted by the Fascist regime and killed under Nazi torture when Carlo was just five years old—and celebrated writer Natalia Ginzburg. He went on to become one of the most influential historians of the twentieth century, widely regarded as one of the founders of microhistory, a school of historical research that emerged in Italy in the 1970s and sought to reconstruct the past through the experiences of ordinary individuals rather than political elites. After studying at the University of Pisa and the Scuola Normale Superiore, Ginzburg continued his education at the Warburg Institute in London, and over the course of his career taught at some of the world's most prestigious universities, including Bologna, Harvard, Yale, UCLA, and Princeton, before returning to the Scuola Normale in Pisa. Through influential books such as The Cheese and the Worms, he became one of the leading voices of social history in Italy and beyond. With microhistory, he showed that the lives of anonymous and marginalized figures could help to better understand the past. With his wife Anna Rossi-Doria, he had two daughters: Silvia, an art historian, and Lisa, a novelist and historian of philosophy. He taught generations of readers and scholars that traces matter, that clues speak, and that history is never simple. Until the very end, he remained committed to intellectual debate, publishing essays, granting interviews, and participating regularly in conferences, with his great obsession being the defense of historical truth in the face of the rise of fake news.

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Ginzburg