27 February 2013, Italian Cultural Institute, London
Carlo Ginzburg in conversation with Filippo de Vivo (Birkbeck, University of London)
"The historian's craft (and, in a different way, the poet's) involves something that is part of everyone's life: untangling the strands of the true, the false, and the fictional which are the substance of our being in the world".
Carlo Ginzburg, one of the best known historians of our times, was educated at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and has taught at the Universities of Pisa, Bologna and Los Angeles. The founder of micro-history, he is celebrated for his methodologically innovative explorations into mentalities, art-history, literature and social history. His most internationally celebrated book, The Cheese and the Worms (English translation: 1980) is an acknowledged classic. His latest book, “Threads and Traces: True False Fictive,” published recently by University of California Press, is a brilliant and timely new collection of essays.