Carlo Ginzburg, the Italian historian whose radical method of reconstructing the mental universe of peasants, millers and heretics transformed the discipline, died overnight in Bologna at the age of 87. Born in Turin in 1939 to the antifascist intellectual Leone Ginzburg and the novelist Natalia Ginzburg, he was among the most translated Italian authors of his generation, a scholar who moved from the archives of the Friuli Inquisition to lecture halls at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and UCLA. His death, confirmed by family sources and the Polo del '900 cultural centre in Turin, prompted tributes from across continents.

Ginzburg was the founding figure of microhistory, the Italian-born current that rejected grand narratives in favour of the minuscule clue, the aberrant detail, the trial transcript of an obscure friulian visionary. His 1966 debut 'I Benandanti' unearthed a fertility cult whose members believed they battled witches in nocturnal spirit journeys, while 'Il formaggio e i vermi' (1976) — 'The Cheese and the Worms' — reconstructed the cosmology of Menocchio, a 16th-century miller burned at the stake for his idiosyncratic heresies. That book, translated into more than twenty languages, became a global touchstone for a historiography that took the marginal seriously. Ginzburg called his approach the 'evidential paradigm', a method of reading silences and symptoms that owed as much to Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud as to archival science.

Viewed from Italy, Ginzburg was not only an academic but a civic presence: Bologna's mayor recalled his contribution to the city's library system, where he served on the board, and his decades-long attachment to the city's intellectual life. In France, commentators noted the loss of 'one of the most brilliant figures of Italian critical thought'. Across the Atlantic, Argentine scholars remembered how his work was disseminated by José Emilio Burucúa and Aníbal Ford, and a recent volume 'El hilo y las huellas' had just been published in Buenos Aires. Russian readers knew him through 'The Cheese and the Worms' and his 1989 study of sabbaths, 'Storia notturna'. In Israel, a former colleague hoped his work would soon appear in Hebrew. English-language obituaries stressed his role in giving voice to the voiceless, a historian who proved that the lives of the illiterate could illuminate entire epochs.

Ginzburg's legacy is not merely a shelf of classic monographs but a way of seeing. In one of his last interviews, he reflected that 'the individual disappears but generations succeed one another; what is new is the fragility of the planet.' That remark, made to an Argentine newspaper, captured the double register of his thought: an acute awareness of human finitude and a stubborn faith in the longue durée. His students, now teaching from Rome to California, carry forward a method that insists on the irreducible complexity of the past. At a moment when history is again being weaponised by populists and strongmen, Ginzburg's meticulous, empathetic reconstruction of forgotten worlds stands as a quiet rebuke — and an enduring invitation to look closer.