In late October 2014, Carlo Ginzburg, 76 years old at the time, invited us into his home, a spacious apartment in the middle of Bologna. Following him to his study, which looked out onto a small terrace, we passed by a long wooden table entirely covered with stacks of books and manuscripts like an antiquarian topography, as if someone had playfully built a model of a city, using books for the skyscrapers. Having settled into his most comfortable reading chair by the terrace door, Ginzburg generously shared his stories and theories in a conversation that lasted the better part of two days.

We had travelled to Bologna with the artist Michelle Teran as part of a research project that took microhistory as the starting point for a mutual exchange between history and the visual arts, especially the video essay. A dozen brief excerpts from our conversation with Ginzburg appeared in the anthology that formed one of the project’s outcomes. Fast-forward to the present: with a new Swedish edition of The Cheese and the Worms due to be published and a visit from the author scheduled for the occasion, we felt compelled to revisit the original recordings and we were immediately transported – if only in spirit – back to Ginzburg’s study with its towering bookshelves and its views over the rooftops of Bologna, following once more his meandering exposition, led by his own associations as much as by our questions about his life, his ideas, and his work.

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Magnus Bärtås, Andrej Slávik & Michelle Teran, The devil’s advocate: a conversation with Carlo Ginzburg (Stockholm: Stockholmia, 2025), 123 p., ISBN 978–91–70313–99–8. Buy the book here.