In the Smallest Stories, a World
The American Academy in Rome mourns the passing of Carlo Ginzburg, the distinguished Italian historian and pioneering figure in the field of microhistory. He died on June 17, 2026, in Bologna, where he had been living. He was 87.
A scholar driven by a deep commitment to uncovering histories overlooked or unimagined, Ginzburg transformed the study of the past by using individual events, communities, and marginal figures to illuminate broader patterns in human history. His works, translated into numerous languages, include The Cheese and the Worms (1976), widely regarded as a foundational text in the field, and The Night Battles (1966).
He taught at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and UCLA before returning to Italy, where he held a position at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa from 2006 to 2010, and later in Bologna, his final academic appointment before his death.
He traced his early interest in marginal and excluded forms of knowledge to both his Jewish heritage and the stories of witches, werewolves, and magical thinking that marked his childhood. Across his career, he would repeatedly return to questions of persecution, marginality, and the complex nature of faith.
At the heart of his work was a commitment to recovering marginalized or disregarded voices, an intellectual drive rooted in curiosity about the world which he maintained could be applied to understand everyday life as well. As he told one interviewer: "we know, and always will, very little about human history."
In 2024, he was awarded the American Academy in Rome’s Centennial Medal at the Academy’s New York Gala, alongside composer Terence Blanchard and artist Jenny Holzer, in recognition of his enduring contribution to the humanities. Introducing him, Peter N. Miller, President and CEO, explained “Carlo Ginzburg was trained in Italy and made a large part of his career in the United States. Carlo Ginzburg began his post-graduate life thinking he would be a writer and became a scholar. Crossing from one point on life’s compass to another, Carlo Ginzburg created a whole new way of doing history, and a new way of writing about it. In all this, Carlo Ginzburg illustrates so perfectly the work and aspirations of the American Academy in Rome.”