The Devil's Advocate
A Conversation with Carlo Ginzburg
In the autumn of 2014, Carlo Ginzburg, then 76 years old, opened the door to his home in Bologna for a long conversation about history, method, and life. Over two intense days, he shared his experiences, thoughts, and memories—from his childhood in an anti-fascist family to the development of the research approach that came to be known as microhistory.
The conversation is presented here in its entirety for the first time, carefully edited and supplemented with comments and references that make it possible to follow Ginzburg’s intellectual world in all its twists and turns. The result is a living document—not a tribute, but an insight into an intellectual life marked by curiosity, sharpness, and resistance.
Ginzburg speaks about how microhistory emerged from concrete questions about sources, truth, and narrative; about his friendship with Italo Calvino and about the method he called the devil’s advocate—the willingness to fully test another person’s perspective in order to ask the truly difficult questions.
The conversation also moves through 20th-century Italy: the war, the fall of fascism, the internal contradictions of communism, and the intellectual struggle that followed. Through Ginzburg’s family history—his mother Natalia Ginzburg, writer and member of parliament; his father Leone Ginzburg, publisher and anti-fascist, killed in prison in 1944—the story becomes both personal and political, a microcosm of Europe’s violent century.
Editors: Magnus Bärtås, Andrej Slávik, Michelle Teran
Language: English
Design: Beatrice Bohman
Series: Konstfack Research Collection, 4
Series: Mikrohistoriskt bibliotek / Microhistorical library, No. 1 (Stockholmia förlag)
ISBN: 9789170313998 (November 2025)
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