He likes to tell how he randomly selected files from the Venice state archives – a procedure he calls ‘Venetian roulette’ – or let himself be guided by chance connections of titles in a computerized catalogue. It is driven by an insatiable curiosity and a constant taste for discovery. However, Ginzburg’s immense erudition, as one of the founders of ‘microhistory’ and probably its greatest representative, is not designed to intimidate. In his mouth, the adjective ‘magnificent’ recurs to describe in turn a book, a sentence, a notion, a comma. He proceeds by associations of works and ideas, which he deploys with virtuosity and enjoyment. You have to cast off and travel with him from island to island in the company of Aristotle and Benvenista, Stendhal and Dante, or Machiavelli and Pascal, the subjects of his latest book, Nondimanco (‘nevertheless’, not yet translated). The window is open, and behind the ochre roofs you can see the two medieval towers that dominate the city.Ĭarlo Ginzburg speaks as readily as he writes. In a small office also full of books, the historian, born in 1939, answers our questions in a precise and careful French. A library with a feel of Borges – though perhaps Ginzburg’s inspiration is the immense library of art historian Aby Warburg, who interested him so much. We follow him through an astonishing maze of corridors, walls covered with shelves, a sequence of rooms in which tables and desks are weighed down by opened books and thick files of papers and documents. Ginzburg opens the door with a broad smile. There is the murmur of a thousand tongues, tourists still numerous at the end of the summer. This is on a beautiful square in the city centre, a stone’s throw from the former Jewish ghetto. An encounter in Bologna, amid his extraordinary library.Ĭarlo Ginzburg suggested that the interview take place in Bologna, in the building where he lives. Carlo Ginzburg’s fine escapes by Guillaume Calafat and Claire Zalcįrom the Inquisition to Machiavelli, from Dante to art history, this insatiable inquirer likes the stimulus of documents from the past, while always tracking details and anomalies in the archives.
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