Always read more than one book at a time. He understands reading as a game of Chinese boxes: "Through a book others are read and many others are remembered." The intellectual and mental journey intersects in Carlo Ginzburg (Turin, 84 years) with his rigor of an unorthodox but punctiliously precise historian. The son of Natalia and Leo Ginzburg is not orthodox because he has searched in the traces of the past what was not written. He works, however, with the meticulous precision of classical historians: even speaking he is unable to cite an idea without attributing it to its author. He has, of course, the memory of an elephant to turn to Gramsci, Auerbach, Marc Bloch or his teachers: Delio Cantimori or Arsenio Frugoni. They are all synthesized here because, the reader will understand, an interview cannot carry footnotes.
He has lived in the heart of Bologna since 1970. Eight years ago he moved to the third floor of a palazzo with soaring ceilings and infinite living rooms where only the kitchen table is not buried under books.
Everything interesting happens in the shade.
Céline said it: "We know nothing of the true history of men." There are infinite lives that leave no trace. And there are footprints that have not been studied. It is as if the testimonies that have decided history are just the tip of an iceberg.
Is history with capital letters that of the powerful?
Being able to leave a mark has been a social privilege. Obviously, in the distribution of data between men and women, men have left more footprint.
Apply the microscope to the story and another one appears.
I arrived after studying Freud's clinical cases. The case involves generalization. I thought the anomaly is richer than the norm. The standard cannot record all violations of the standard while the anomaly, by definition, includes the standard.
In 1976, with Cheese and Worms, he made the small speak: he gave birth to microhistory.
My book is cited as the origin of the term, but it was discussions about the book that coined it. They argued that the case I analyzed, that of Menocchio, a miller who could read and was interrogated and imprisoned by the Inquisition, was too exceptional. Then Edoardo Grendi defined it as "the normal exceptional".
The difference between historian and anthropologist is that the former uses the term culture only to refer to the upper classes.
An oxymoron.
Just. Menocchio participated in an oral culture that was not only his, that is: he was generalizable and at the same time exceptional because he knew how to read. And think. The difference between historian and anthropologist is that the former uses the term culture only to refer to the upper classes. And anthropologists use it to describe broader activities and ideas. In my work I recognize a dialogue between anthropology and history, between high and low culture.
Do the declassed have a history?
Of course they do. But the testimonies, the traces they have left, have been considered, and filtered, from the upper class because the peasants did not know how to write. The poor were studied as statistics. I wanted to show that they could be studied in depth.
The author of 'The cheese and the worms', in his house in the center of Bologna, definitely conquered by books. Jacobo Medrano
Is written history a manipulation?
The story depends on the questions we ask him.
What confers authority on a historian? The doubt? The objective data?
The case. What gives authorship gives authority and that is evidence. The difference between fictional narration and historical narration does not exist because in reality everything is rhetoric. It's not my idea, it's White's. I have worked on two rhetorical traditions, the one that begins with Aristotle and the anti-Aristotelian one: Nietzsche. In the first, evidence is fundamental. Nietzsche's On Truth and Lies argues that truth does not exist. There is power.
Do you share it?
I have always looked for a non-obvious strategy between the two. Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks, which he wrote locked up in a fascist prison, pointed out two strategies, the war of movement and that of position: attack or entrench. He entrenches himself when he distinguishes between hegemonic and subaltern culture to dodge fascist censorship. If I had spoken of proletariat instead of subaltern culture, it would not have been so translated. The first time I went to India, in 1988, I realized that the public and I had a common language. It was Gramsci: to speak of subaltern culture was ambiguous, but that term allowed him to write another history.
The history of India, or that of Mexico, has been studied from the point of view of the colonizers.
But there is that of the colonized: ethnophilology I call it. [The Inca] Garcilaso de la Vega was the son of a conquistador and an Inca princess. He wrote in Spanish, the language of the father, trying to defend the culture of the mother. He underlined the distance between what was interpreted and what happened. Machiavelli made an analogy with landscape painters and pointed out the need to climb to know the chasms and to go down to look at the peaks. From the village observe the princes, and from the command, to the people. Only distance allows us to understand deeply.
The historian starts from issues related to the present.
Of course, the perspective of those who lived through the moment is missing. Benedetto Croce wrote: "Any true history is contemporary history." And his friend Giovanni Gentile, who was Minister of Education and then became a fascist and was assassinated by partisans in 1944, wrote: "The past does not exist. It exists only at the moment we think about it." Any story is history compared between our questions and those of those who lived in the moment. Microstories are stories of the world.
Does microhistory bring a worldview closer?
I distinguish two types of estrangement to build the great story. One starts from Marcus Aurelius, and the other from Proust, which represents the unexpected aesthetic. Proust invented a painter who drew the sea as if it were a meadow. Why? Because the important thing is not what is known about the sea. It is what is perceived. To see you have to distance yourself from what you know.
As a historian, how do you make yourself understandable to those who know little?
Estrangement is looking from a distance to observe in another light. I have dealt with anonymous people, like Menocchio, the miller of The Cheese and the Worms. But I have also studied Piero della Francesca. And I have investigated how Dante read the texts from understanding how Menocchio had read them. I don't mean that this miller and Dante looked alike. I want to say that from one I have learned things that have allowed me to understand the other in a broader way.
Why did you need to put everything in doubt?
I don't doubt everything, but I do doubt a lot. I come from a privileged family.
Privileged, but very persecuted.
Justly. The two things together. This double condition has marked my way of investigating. My privilege wasn't just growing up surrounded by books, it was also having models.
Written culture is threatened. Reading has become a privilege to which you have to devote more time than money
Your father died when you were five years old.
Mussolini's regime ended on July 25, 1943. Shortly afterwards my father went to Rome, where he ran an underground anti-fascist newspaper: L'Italia Libera. My mother then took us there to meet him. And they stopped him. He was tortured and died in February 1944. His idea of philology has been key for me. I met her posthumously when I collected her writings.
Do you remember him?
I have memories. Hiding near Florence with my mother and maternal grandmother—the only non-Jewish person in the family—I remember him saying to me, "If they ask you what your name is, answer Carlo Tanzi." My brother stayed in Rome with a person who had taken care of my father. My sister was put in an institution until the end of the war. Then we met in Turin. My brother was an economist. He died last year, in Bologna. And my sister is a psychoanalyst and lives in Rome.
In his writings he compares psychoanalysis to confession.
Yes.
In psychoanalysis you forgive yourself, or you don't. And in confession the priest does.
Exactly. I meant that in Freud's environment confession was commonplace. In a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess he wrote: "I am struck by the closeness between what women accused of witchcraft said and what my patients tell me."
He has compared covens, the persecution of witches and Jewish persecution.
I tried to decipher the coven. In 1321 a conspiracy against Christianity emerged in France. One version was that behind it were the lepers who wanted to poison the waters. Another pointed to lepers, inspired by the Jews. And a third, to the lepers inspired by the Jews inspired, in turn, by the king of Granada. The first testimony of this plot leads to the persecution of the Jews at the time of the plague, 1348, as responsible for the plague. Here we are again before elements of high and low culture. The shamanic part has popular roots and that of the plot is piloted from above. From the intersection of these two elements emerges the coven.
"To see you have to distance yourself from what you know," says Carlo Ginzburg. Jacobo Medrano
He had no chance to question his parents.
Sure, my father wasn't there, I could dodge his memory or look more into him. And that's what I did. My mother wrote novels. And I dreamed of doing the same. I also dreamed of being a painter. And all that in the end has been mixed in my way of working: narration, passion for painting...
What do you remember about your childhood?
I was born in Turin. My father had come from Odessa. And his clandestine work as an anti-fascist began only after he became an Italian citizen. He was bilingual. He taught Russian literature. But his academic career ended when the fascist regime asked professors to swear allegiance to the regime and failed to do so. He lost his citizenship under the racial laws of 1938 and served two years in prison. He founded with Giulio Einaudi, who was 21 years old, the Einaudi publishing house and, as a Jew without citizenship, was confined in a small village in Abruzzo. My mother took us there, to live with him, my brother Andrea and me. Then they had our sister Alessandra. So my early childhood, between 1940 and 1943, was ignorant, but beautiful. Then I realized how much, in my way of investigating, I was rooted in that childhood experience.
What do you mean?
There was a girl, Concetta, who helped my mother. And my mother wrote about her. My mother noticed everything.
Have you read all the novels your mother wrote?
Yes.
Did he apply what he defends in The Small Virtues: generosity over savings...?
Yes. We talked about it a lot. It was like that. The photograph of the cover of that book was made by me.
He gets up. He climbs the stairs, manages to find the book, looks at his mother's photograph on the cover and smiles: "Bella, huh?"
What do you remember about her?
You can imagine... [Silence] I can't tell him.
Don't you like to talk about your mother?
I belong to a generation in which the separation between public and private was different from what exists today.
And is that better or worse?
I don't know. I feel it as part of my culture, my psychology. Mine is mine.
Do you have children?
Two daughters and three grandchildren. One, Silvia, is an art historian and teaches in Rome 3. The other, Lisa, writes novels.
How difficult to be called Ginzburg!
Imagine. But he's doing well.
How did his mother raise him not to be afraid of the shadow of Natalia Ginzburg?
Oh my God; my father; my maternal grandfather, Giuseppe Levi — who was a famous biologist and three of his students won the Nobel Prize — have all been important figures to me. In education, what is not said is fundamental. What cannot be translated into words. What is transmitted without words, but is decisive, shapes life and builds the relationship with truth.
He holds that it is fear that creates the gods. Who or what creates fear?
Fear is always available. The question is who uses it. It is created and then it is believed in the created. It is a wonderful phrase of Tacitus that is found in many other thinkers.
Doesn't the truth change?
We must distinguish. Mathematical truths do not change. But the meaning of the words does. Our words are not his. It is about reconstructing the specific meaning that a truth had in a certain context.
Was Jesus Christ the first poor and powerful person?
The power of Christ was not part of his life. It was not he who founded Christianity, but Paul. It is true that it is impressive that a religion of marginal people at a certain moment conquers the empire. But Christ's worldly power was nil. Jesus' dismay: "My God, why have you forsaken me?" It's in the Gospels. And it is the opposite of power.
Did poverty bring you closer to the people?
I am an atheist. In Ojazos de madera I start from the idea that in the New Testament there are many prophecies of the Old fulfilled. That is, we are facing a text that generates another. If we follow that lead, it turns out that much of Christ's childhood and passion is a reformulation of events from what Christians call the Old Testament. I believe Jesus existed. But that the Gospels reworked history. Many Christian scholars come to this idea, but do not state it clearly. Jews, too, are reluctant to do so.
Today culture is born from the popular classes in music, in cinema...
Films that talk about the popular classes are not usually immediately successful. Think Bicycle Thief. I saw her with my mother when she was 10 years old. I was shocked. But it was not a great success.
Today is film history.
It is a film that excites a lot. But it is difficult to identify with the protagonist: no one looks so miserable. That's the strength of the film.
Very few young people read. Are we witnessing the end of the monopoly of written culture?
Written culture is threatened. Reading has become a privilege to which you have to devote more time than money.
It is paradoxical that this happens with the highest literacy rates in history.
My proposal would be to combine internet speed with slow reading. Nietzsche defined philology as "the art of slow reading". Is that it. Each speed leads you to a kind of knowledge.
It defends the serendipity of unexpected data. Has the algorithm shattered that fluke?
I use Google a lot. The key is estrangement: to understand reality it is important to observe it as if it were something dark, something that is not understood.
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