Carlo Ginzburg, one of Italy’s most influential historians and essayists of the postwar era, has died at the age of 87. Born in Turin on April 15, 1939, Ginzburg inherited a remarkable intellectual legacy. He was the son of anti-fascist hero Leone Ginzburg and celebrated writer Natalia Ginzburg.

After studying at the University of Pisa, the Scuola Normale Superiore, and London’s prestigious Warburg Institute, Ginzburg embarked on an international academic career that took him to some of the world’s leading universities, including Bologna, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and UCLA. He later returned to the Scuola Normale in Pisa as Professor of European Cultural History.

Internationally recognized as one of the founders of microhistory, a historiographical approach that emerged in Italy during the 1970s, Ginzburg revolutionized historical research by examining broad historical processes through the experiences of ordinary individuals. His work explored popular culture, heresy, witchcraft, and religious beliefs in early modern Europe.

His first major work, The Night Battles (1966), investigated witchcraft and agrarian cults in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Friuli through records of the Inquisition. His most celebrated book, however, remains The Cheese and the Worms (1976), a global bestseller that reconstructed the extraordinary worldview of Menocchio, a sixteenth-century miller executed for heresy.

In 1981, Ginzburg published Investigating Piero, a groundbreaking study of Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca that also launched Einaudi’s influential Microstorie series.

In recent years, he lived in Bologna, where he was often seen walking through the city’s historic center. He is survived by his daughters Silvia, an art historian, and Lisa, a writer and historian of philosophy.

With his passing, the world loses a scholar who taught generations to view history through the eyes of those who were too often left out of its pages.