Sanjay Subrahmanyam in Sidecar:
The influential Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg – once described by Perry Anderson as ‘the outstanding European historian of the generation which came of age in the late Sixties’ – passed away in Bologna last month at the age of eighty-seven. He had been ailing for some months, and was no longer able to leave his home, but still made an appearance via Zoom at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome in late May, for a conference on Marc Bloch that he helped to organize. Ginzburg remained intellectually active through his months of illness and published a last collection of his essays entitled Il vincolo della vergogna: Letture oblique in late 2025. Not long after I received a copy of the book from Adelphi, Ginzburg’s regular publisher of later years, he sent a mortified email informing me of a ‘correction to a dreadful mistake which defaces my book’, namely a lapse of concentration that had led him to make a small and rather obvious factual error about Joseph de Maistre. It was of little help to try and console the perfectionist historian with a reference to Horace’s adage about how even Homer nods. This punctiliousness was among the varied aspects of Carlo’s personality that were recalled at a crowded noonday memorial held at one of his favourite locations in Bologna, the Archiginnasio Municipal Library off the Piazza Maggiore, where he was remembered as a thinker and researcher, an active citizen, a patron of learning, a teacher and a friend. In keeping with his family’s secular traditions, he was buried the same day at a private ceremony (including his wife and two daughters) 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, which meant that he had spent much of his adult life in the public eye. 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 and elsewhere. Ginzburg liked to joke that even the butcher on Via Oberdan, near his home, could quote anecdotes from his mother’s memoirs.
More here.
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