Carlo Ginzburg, the historian who uncovered the lives of peasants and millers through microhistory, dies at 87

A life in the archives

Carlo Ginzburg, born in Turin on 15 April 1939, died overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday in Bologna at the age of 87. His daughter, the writer and philosopher Lisa Ginzburg, posted a farewell on Instagram, and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where he taught, confirmed the news. No cause of death was given.

The birth of microhistory

Ginzburg helped create microhistory, a movement that reacted against large‑scale quantitative history by reconstructing individual lives. While most of his contemporaries studied princes and statesmen, he spent years deciphering the testimony of a 16th‑century Friulian miller who believed the world arose from rotting cheese. His work drew on anthropology, literary theory and art criticism, and he famously linked the clue‑gathering of Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud to the historian’s method.

The cheese and the worms

Published in 1976, “The Cheese and the Worms” became his most celebrated book. It followed the Inquisition trial of Menocchio, a miller who was burned at the stake for heresy. Two decades earlier, “The Night Battles” (I benandanti, 1966) explored a peasant fertility cult in Friuli that the Church interpreted as witchcraft. Other titles, such as “Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method” and “History of the Night”, cemented his international reputation.

A family of letters and resistance

He was the son of the novelist and translator Natalia Ginzburg and the Russian‑literature professor Leone Ginzburg, an antifascist militant who died in prison. Although the historian rarely spoke about his private life in public, friends recalled his memories of learning French from his mother as she translated Proust, and of the seminars of Delio Cantimori in Pisa that shaped his early thinking.

Bologna mourns a critical voice

“With Carlo Ginzburg disappears one of the most brilliant figures of Italian critical thought, who accompanied the life of our city.”

Bologna’s mayor, Matteo Lepore, issued the statement through the Ansa news agency. Ginzburg taught at the University of Bologna, as well as at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, UCLA and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where he later held a chair in the history of European cultures.