The justly celebrated and highly influential Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg passed away at his home in Bologna on the night of June 16/17, 2026, at the age of 87. He had been ailing for some months, and no longer left his home, but the end was still a shock to his many friends and admirers. Earlier the same day, he had received his old friend and collaborator Giovanni Levi and showed that even if he was physically diminished, the old mental spark remained to the end. The intellectual community in Bologna held a memorial at one of his favourite places in the city, the Archiginnasio Municipal Library off the Piazza Maggiore, on June 19, where he was remembered as a thinker and researcher, an active citizen, a patron of learning, a teacher, and a friend; and he was buried in a secular way at a private ceremony by his family (including his wife and two daughters) the same day 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. 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. His father, Leone Ginzburg, who migrated to Italy from Odessa in what is now Ukraine, was a literary scholar and translator from Russian into Italian, who helped found a famous Italian publishing house, Einaudi, in Turin. After joining the anti-Nazi resistance, he was arrested and killed in a Roman prison in February 1944. At that time, Carlo was barely five years old and had already experienced a period of “internal exile” with his younger brother and sister which marked him for life. The author with Carlo Ginzburg in Cerisy, France, in September 2022. Photo: Sanjay SubrahmanyamCarlo’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 Franz Kafka and Marcel 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 Italo Calvino), and he recalled even having accompanied his mother to the Cinecittà Studios in Rome, to meet the young Federico Fellini who was making a film. Carlo was tempted early on by a literary career, and also an artistic one. Though he was later dismissive of his own talents, the recent rediscovery of some of his early sketches (many of them portraits of his brother) 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.‘Lessico Famigliare’.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 recognised 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 for all its nuances and subtleties. Carlo came to believe as a result that at the heart of history was sound philological practice, with philology being defined in a very ample sense, influenced in his case by another figure, namely Erich Auerbach.However, Carlo Ginzburg did not want to be a simple disciple of Cantimori, who had an attachment 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 were bringing to the study of daily life, both in Italy and elsewhere.Delio Cantimori. Photo: Public domain/Wikipedia.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 them protect the 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 surrounding them at birth. Rather than dismissing such views as mere popular superstition, or foolish irrationality, as some leftist analysts of peasant life might have done, Carlo sought to make a fine-grained reading of such beliefs using the records of the Inquisition, which had wanted to identify and stamp out such heterodox tendencies. He published this book in 1966, and it had some impact in Italian historical circles, but not much beyond them. At much 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 called “microhistory (microstoria)” a few years later. The initial figures in the enterprise, besides Carlo, were his childhood friend Giovanni Levi, along with 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 generally best known now as an historian of Genoese merchants. On the other hand, Carlo’s career took a decisive turn with the publication in 1976 of his book, The Cheese and the Worms. Based, like his earlier work, on a close reading of Inquisition records from the Friuli region, this relative slim book explored the mental world of a 16th century miller called Domenico Scandella (d. 1599), known by his nickname of “Menocchio”. Despite his modest social origins, Menocchio was literate and was also able to mobilise some quite unexpected cultural resources while creating his own imaginative cosmogonic vision, which was quite opposed to the orthodoxy of the Catholic church. Naturally, this led to his being investigated and eventually burnt at stake, but not before he had shared many quite startling thoughts with the Inquisitors. At the time of its appearance, the book was compared with Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, from 1975, also based on Inquisition records, notably in a review by Christopher Hill. But despite some superficial similarities, the comparison is not entirely to Le Roy Ladurie’s advantage, especially because of Carlo’s far more rigorous philological practice and understanding of context.The nocturnal visionary tradition of the benandante led the Roman Inquisition to accuse them of being witches, malevolent Satanists depicted in this 1508 woodcut by Hans Baldung Grien. Photo: R. Decker, Hexen, Frontispiz (2004), Public Domain.Within a few years, The Cheese and the Worms had been widely translated, and attained the status of a modern classic. Carlo himself became more and more visible not only in Europe, but in the English-speaking world, especially the United States. This eventually led to his being offered a prestigious professorship in UCLA in 1988, where he remained (sometimes as part-time faculty) until 2006, before returning to teach in the last years of his active career at the Scuola Normale in Pisa. In UCLA, he developed a close friendship with scholars such as Perry Anderson, despite the fact that the latter wrote some searching critiques of Carlo’s approach to history.In the years after 1988, Carlo produced one more major monograph, entitled Storia notturna (in English, Ecstasies), but mostly turned to writing a wide variety of essays on an astonishing diversity of topics, which have often been published in thematic collections such as Threads and Traces (2012), and Nevertheless (2018). In these essays, he explores a number of early modern and modern authors, ranging from Niccolo Machiavelli, Michel de Montaigne, and Blaise Pascal to Sigmund Freud, Marc Bloch and Erich Auerbach. It is, however, evident that from the 1990s, he became less a social and cultural historian and more an intellectual historian, one of whose main preoccupations was to 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.Some of his choices in regard to the social sciences eventually became unfashionable, such as his obstinate loyalty towards French structuralism and the figure of Claude Lévi-Strauss (paired with a passionate loathing for figures like Mircea Eliade). He also 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 Carlo wrote on the case, The Judge and the Historian, published in 1991, both earned him admirers and made him some enemies, including amongst the erstwhile friends of his youth. It showed however that Carlo was never afraid to put his reputation on the line to take an unpopular position. ‘The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice’A more purely academic difference (albeit with larger implications) was one that opposed him and the American scholar Hayden White, in the early 1990s on the subject of the growing “neo-scepticism” in the US academy and what Carlo saw as the real differences between historical narrative and fiction. White’s rather simple-minded admirers, who continue to be numerous in the American academy, have never quite forgiven Carlo for his sharply worded response, which even today is a part of required reading on historical method in many universities in the western world.I should mention in conclusion that Carlo had an interesting connection with India. In his youth, he had been fascinated by Indian cinema, and he seized the occasion to visit India when it was first presented to him in the late 1980s by the French historian Maurice Aymard. He then returned there in the 2000s, to deliver the IESHR Lecture in Delhi at my invitation and made it a point at the time to visit Bahrisons in Khan Market to purchase a hefty packet of the last generation of books on Indian history published there. Subsequently, he returned several times to Delhi and to Kolkata, where he developed a relationship with Seagull Books and its editor Naveen Kishore. In 2022, Seagull published a small collection of Carlo’s essays, The Soul of Brutes, and in 2026, the translation of a long-neglected work he had written in 1975 with his friend Adriano Prosperi, Puzzles: A Seminar on the ‘Benefit of Christ’. For those who wish to better understand the author of The Cheese and the Worms, these two works are a good introduction to the rich and impressive corpus he has left behind.Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Professor of History at UCLA, and was a colleague and friend of Carlo Ginzburg, who worked with him on several projects.