Fragments of Distant Lives, Unknown and Familiar | Verso Books
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Carlo Ginzburg was a formidable traveler. You might have written to him several times over the course of a few weeks, and he would have replied once from the Paris airport, another time from a hotel in Sibiu, the next from Saint Petersburg or Los Angeles, where he had just arrived after being in Beijing. Years ago, at the ceremony in which he was granted honorary citizenship of Montereale Valcellina (the Friulian village where the miller Menocchio had lived), his friend Adriano Prosperi described the way Ginzburg had of entering cities during his countless travels: as if it were always the first time. It seems, in fact, that the feeling of return was foreign to him, and he used to say of himself that he had always had an intense relationship with landscapes, but a “very faint sense of belonging to places.” Besides, it was he who suggested to us the most interesting reading of the Italian saying “tutto il mondo è paese” [every place in the world is like our place]: not that everything is the same, but that “we all find ourselves astray, out of place, vis-à-vis some things and some people” — a condition full of benefits for the far too small cosmos of our ego — only to encounter, in the most wildly distant and estranging of physical or imaginary places, something profoundly familiar.
The tension between estrangement and familiarity is also one of the keys to Ginzburg’s historiography, to his way of immersing himself in the human landscape. And the faint sense of belonging was probably what allowed him to shake off every label that threatened to become a cage. No field, theme, form, group, school, not even the editorship of the legendary Einaudi series “Microstorie,” and not even any methodology refined over the course of a specific inquiry (as when he planned to write a book on Jean-Pierre Purry, to which he had devoted several years of research, but then it seemed to him too similar in structure to the study on Menocchio, and he let it go) — nothing could keep pace with his relentless hunt for something that might dislodge the already known, place intelligence and the imagination before a problem, give rise to the thing most difficult for any researcher to find: a genuine question, born of the encounter with opacity and with the unknown, ideally presaging multiple layers of truth.
But at the foundation of this radically dynamic stance lies Carlo Ginzburg’s fierce fidelity to his vocation as a historian, which was also the oblique form of his daily political and human engagement, carried out through research, writing, and teaching. When he evoked the scene of the decision made when he was twenty in front of a shelf in the university library — from which this long fidelity to the historian’s craft began — some may have recalled that page from Little Virtues, where Natalia Ginzburg, his mother, describes the awareness of being unable to produce or control, and at the same time the elementary duty to encourage and not obstruct, the birth of “a vocation, an ardent and exclusive passion” in a child.
In his mother’s pages, Carlo the son appears on several occasions. He is the young man with “coal eyes,” a “black, unkempt, and wild head of hair,” whom the writer discovers to be one of her very few interlocutors, to whom she submits what she writes, and who delights her by covering her “in insults and invectives, with amused and savage arrogance.” And he is the child taken together with his siblings, every morning, at dawn, for long walks in the snow in Pizzoli, the village in the Abruzzi where the family lived when Leone, the father, an antifascist, was sentenced to internal exile [confino]. And it is precisely to that childhood in the Abruzzi — but more generally to the stories and readings of childhood —...