Fragments of Distant Lives, Unknown and Familiar

Carlo Ginzburg was a formidable traveler. You might have written to him several times over the course of a few weeks, and he would have replied once from the Paris airport, another time from a hotel in Sibiu, the next from Saint Petersburg or Los Angeles, where he had just arrived after being in Beijing. Years ago, at the ceremony in which he was granted honorary citizenship of Montereale Valcellina (the Friulian village where the miller Menocchio had lived), his friend Adriano Prosperi described the way Ginzburg had of entering cities during his countless travels: as if it were always the first time. It seems, in fact, that the feeling of return was foreign to him, and he used to say of himself that he had always had an intense relationship with landscapes, but a “very faint sense of belonging to places.” Besides, it was he who suggested to us the most interesting reading of the Italian saying “tutto il mondo è paese” [every place in the world is like our place]: not that everything is the same, but that “we all find ourselves astray, out of place, vis-à-vis some things and some people” — a condition full of benefits for the far too small cosmos of our ego — only to encounter, in the most wildly distant and estranging of physical or imaginary places, something profoundly familiar.

The tension between estrangement and familiarity is also one of the keys to Ginzburg’s historiography, to his way of immersing himself in the human landscape. And the faint sense of belonging was probably what allowed him to shake off every label that threatened to become a cage. No field, theme, form, group, school, not even the editorship of the legendary Einaudi series “Microstorie,” and not even any methodology refined over the course of a specific inquiry (as when he planned to write a book on Jean-Pierre Purry, to which he had devoted several years of research, but then it seemed to him too similar in structure to the study on Menocchio, and he let it go) — nothing could keep pace with his relentless hunt for something that might dislodge the already known, place intelligence and the imagination before a problem, give rise to the thing most difficult for any researcher to find: a genuine question, born of the encounter with opacity and with the unknown, ideally presaging multiple layers of truth.

But at the foundation of this radically dynamic stance lies Carlo Ginzburg’s fierce fidelity to his vocation as a historian, which was also the oblique form of his daily political and human engagement, carried out through research, writing, and teaching. When he evoked the scene of the decision made when he was twenty in front of a shelf in the university library — from which this long fidelity to the historian’s craft began — some may have recalled that page from Little Virtues, where Natalia Ginzburg, his mother, describes the awareness of being unable to produce or control, and at the same time the elementary duty to encourage and not obstruct, the birth of “a vocation, an ardent and exclusive passion” in a child.

In his mother’s pages, Carlo the son appears on several occasions. He is the young man with “coal eyes,” a “black, unkempt, and wild head of hair,” whom the writer discovers to be one of her very few interlocutors, to whom she submits what she writes, and who delights her by covering her “in insults and invectives, with amused and savage arrogance.” And he is the child taken together with his siblings, every morning, at dawn, for long walks in the snow in Pizzoli, the village in the Abruzzi where the family lived when Leone, the father, an antifascist, was sentenced to internal exile [confino]. And it is precisely to that childhood in the Abruzzi — but more generally to the stories and readings of childhood — that Ginzburg returned on several occasions to trace the thread of things he would later reweave in his research as an adult: the macabre lullabies sung to him by Crocetta, the young girl who nursed him in Pizzoli, but also the reading of illustrated fairy tales, among which he recalled on more than one occasion the terrifying metamorphoses of the character Gomitetto in the beloved Italian Fairy Tales by Luigi Capuana.

I attended many of his seminars, but I never attended one of Ginzburg’s university lectures. About his way of teaching, I know the accounts of former students who later became my friends: a true legendary archive that will rightly remain the province of oral tradition, rich in anecdotes and by now mythological turns of phrase. Many say — and Ottavia Niccoli wrote it years ago — that Ginzburg the teacher could bring you to do things you would never have believed yourself capable of — something I experienced directly. I remember the exhilarating sensation of feeling the perimeters of safety crumble, the anxiety of others’ judgment evaporate, the “that’s not my field” literally demolished by an overwhelming enthusiasm, by the joy of staking everything, by the risk of grasping nothing. I remember working some years ago, for the entire month of August, on a lead that had struck him as intriguing, waking very early every morning and madly writing for about thirty days. In the end some things didn’t add up and I inserted a note promising an extended version of the piece in which I would clarify x and y. I sent it to him. Half an hour later an email arrived: he had obviously read the notes as well, given that his reply was “I can’t wait to read the maior version.”

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It has been said many times, in these days since his passing, that Ginzburg was a giant, in reference to his intellectual and moral stature. And indeed, Carlo often did things on a scale entirely his own, one that rarely allowed for half-measures. Like the welcome he reserved for his visitors, waiting for them on the landing in front of the elevator, arms wide open, a broad and radiant smile, then saying Evviva!; the enormous coffeepot he prepared at any hour of the day, pouring the largest imaginable cups of coffee; the extravagant quantities of parmesan he grated into a bowl, repeatedly inviting you during the meal to add more cheese to your plate; the number of spaces he typed, when writing at the computer, between one word and the next — which could be three, four, or even six — testament to the energy with which he struck the spacebar; the travels I have already mentioned, culminating in an actual around-the-world journey he completed shortly before the pandemic; and of course the enormously ambitious research programs he had set himself, and those he brought to completion. I will recall here only Ecstasies, a book we will reread and that will always have something to tell us, the fruit of more than fifteen years of research, dealing with the witches’ sabbath stereotype, beginning in Friuli and traversing the most remote slopes of Eurasia in search of elements to be included in a large-scale diachronic comparison.

At times, especially in the case of certain essays, reading Carlo Ginzburg is difficult. Not for reasons of style, because his writing is always resistant to technicisms, to formulas that conceal rather than reveal, but for the tortuousness — as he himself would say — of the trails and for the Chinese-box games he so loved as a reader and as a writer. But one can always be certain that even the most arduous of paths leads somewhere — to some truth.

There are still so many things I am tempted to evoke. Some of his memorable replies, for instance: “this is neither a merit nor an extenuating circumstance,” said to an interlocutor who was underscoring, with a certain complaisance, the fact that The Night Battles had been written at the age of twenty-seven; “better a live donkey than a dead horse,” when asked why he did not try his hand at literary writing, given his evident gift for narrative; “all the courage is on the other side,” said with regard to the Catholic Church, when the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s archive was opened to scholars, and someone spoke of Carlo Ginzburg’s courage — he who, several years earlier, had written a letter to Pope Wojtyla asking him to make the documents held there accessible to historians (it was 1978, and he was then studying the case of the converted Jew, jester and distiller, Costantino Saccardino). Or some of his battles: like the one against the abuse of the category of empathy, in which he saw an all-too-easy escape from the imperative of rational analysis and critical detachment; or the one (already clearly delineated in “Spies”) concerning the category of identity, in his view a repressive and dominating instrument, useless on the analytical level. Or his bushy eyebrows, active participants in every conversation, as were his characteristic exclamations — his inimitable Eh già! [Quite so!]. His unbridled pleasure not in knowledge as possession, but in knowing as perpetual motion. His proverbial euphoria of ignorance: the implicit pact of every exchange with him was founded, as Lucio Biasiori recalled in the commemorative address at the Archiginnasio Library, on the idea that ignorance is not something to be ashamed of, but the necessary condition for learning. Or, again, the cornerstones he never tired of reiterating, like the distinction between answers unacceptable on moral grounds and legitimate questions to be wrested from the enemy’s terrain. Or the way he had of pronouncing certain words in other languages, like the Quechua word huacha, which he always cited when recounting a piece of research on Garcilaso de la Vega. Or, finally, those phrases of his that are beacons to which I always return in thought when I lose my bearings, and which I cite here from memory, I hope not too imprecisely: “pleasing everyone is not only impossible, but wrong” (said of microhistory, but extendable to other things); “there should be a Thucydides oath as there is a Hippocratic oath” (a very serious joke); “knowledge proceeds discontinuously, by wrenches”; “literature nourishes our moral imagination” (a lesson received from his mother).

The wave of affection and personal memories that has shaken social media and the press in these past days has been moving — hundreds of photos of worn covers of The Cheese and the Worms, quotations from his most beloved books, evocations of different aspects and sides of Carlo Ginzburg, dear to so many, for so many different reasons. But this comes as no surprise. Just as it comes as no surprise that during his last trip to South America, Ginzburg had been greeted (in Buenos Aires, if I remember correctly) with an actual stadium chant (Olè olè-olè-olè! Carlooooo, Carlooooo!), which clearly expressed the idea that, for popular consciousness, Ginzburg was indeed the emeritus professor of the Scuola Normale of Pisa and the winner of the Balzan Prize, holder of more than twenty honorary degrees; but before and after having been all of this, Carlo Ginzburg was and remains a historian who knew how to look oppression in its many forms — in Adriano Prosperi's apt words — straight in the eye and to recount it with that “tact des mots” [tact of words] of which Marc Bloch spoke. The historian who used his expressive felicity and his vast erudition to give voice to extraordinary stories of moral and intellectual independence in the face of authority, in the lofty and stubborn manner of a Menocchio or a Thiess, or even only in brief flashes of a moment, then plunged back into more mediocre destinies. The historian who brought before the eyes of his readers, in magnificent prose — and this is an ethical fact before being an aesthetic one — the meticulous reconstruction of fragments of distant lives, unknown and familiar.

Originally published on Fata Morgana Web (Rome), June 23, 2026 https://www.fatamorganaweb.it/ricordo-ginzburg/

Translated from Italian to English by the author & Tania Rispoli