Authors: Carlo Ginzburg, Magnus Bärtås, Andrej Slávic, Michelle Teran
Edition 1
ISBN 9789170313998
Language: English
Weight: 174 grams
Publication date: 7.11.2025
Publisher: Stockholmia förlag
Number of pages: 123
In the fall of 2014, Carlo Ginzburg, then 76 years old, opened the door to his home in Bologna for a long conversation about history, methodology, and life. Over two intense days, he shared his experiences, thoughts, and memories—from his childhood in an anti-fascist family to the development of the research approach that came to be known as microhistory.
The conversation is reproduced here in its entirety for the first time, carefully edited and supplemented with comments and references that make it possible to follow the twists and turns of Ginzburg’s thought world. The result is a living document – not a tribute, but an insight into an intellectual life marked by curiosity, sharpness, and resistance.
Ginzburg talks about how microhistory emerged from concrete questions about sources, truth, and storytelling; about his friendship with Italo Calvino and the method he called the devil’s advocate—the willingness to fully examine another person’s point of view in order to ask the really difficult questions.
The conversation also moves through 20th-century Italy: the war, the fall of fascism, the internal contradictions of communism, and the intellectual struggle that followed. Through Ginzburg’s family history—his mother Natalia Ginzburg, writer and member of parliament; his father Leone Ginzburg, publisher and anti-fascist, killed in prison in 1944—the story becomes both personal and political, a microcosm of Europe’s violent century.