Peter W. Marx

Sanjay Subrahmanyam on Carlo Ginzburg: “Walking with him once in the streets of Turin, where he was born, I asked Carlo if he felt any identification with the city, a suggestion that he immediately repudiated. At his memorial, three places in Italy came forward to claim him: Bologna, where he had taught early in his career and to which he retired; the small town in the Abruzzi where he had sheltered as a child; and Montereale Valcellina, where Menocchio had lived. Yet, in one of his later texts, which gave the title to his final book, this is what he wrote: ‘the country we really belong to is not, as rhetoric would have it, the one we love, but the one we are ashamed of, or can be ashamed of’. It was a way for him to affirm that as an Italian of secular Jewish heritage, he refused to let his identity override his critical faculties.”

First book of 2026. Few pleasures compare to immersing oneself in good scholarship while cocooned in a quilt.