Top 3 Carlo Ginzburg Books

In Ginzburg we find a refuge value of the current essay at the height of Noam Chomsky. Only that in Ginzburg we enjoy a narrator with greater literary intentions. With an undeniable historical background, Ginzburg offers us a perspective in the form of a mosaic of human evolution from simple visions that are as complementary as they are enriching.

Everything that sounds intrahistorical points to more legend than reality. Because not all the official chronicles account for what was rescued by Ginzburg. But precisely in the embellishment with a novelistic point, always perfectly delimited by the context of each time, we enjoy a broader vision than the mere transcriptions put black on white for God knows what interests.

History is often a matter of faith. Ginzburg's books are simply a matter of empathy, an empathy with overtones of complete certainty. Because all the great events many times become omitting the small details that cover everything to make the days of yesteryear closer realities from which to understand even better according to what truths.

Top 3 best books by Carlo Ginzburg

the cheese and the Worms

Even it Eppur si muove Galileo Galilei had his antecedents. Facing the Inquisition was not a dish of good taste for anyone who knew the fondness for bonfires, gallows and other amusements for unstoppable sadists. The point is that in this book we find another of those who were ahead of his time and even ahead of those ahead of times to come. A story as unique as it is exciting...

Northern Italy, late XNUMXth century. The Holy Office accuses a miller, Domenico Scandella, whom everyone calls Menocchio, of heresy. The defendant maintains that the world originated in "a chaos" from which "a mass emerged, as cheese is made with milk, and in it worms were formed, and these were the angels." Throughout two inquisitorial processes, the peculiar cosmogony of the accused is stubbornly opposed to that of those who interrogate him.

Starting from the analysis of Menocchio's beliefs ―finally found guilty and sentenced to burn at the stake― and the judicial records of the case, Carlo Ginzburg reconstructs in this contemporary classic a fragment of the so-called "popular culture" ―generally condemned as , to ostracism― which stands, due to its singularity, as a symbol of its time and as a kind of missing link in a dark world, hardly assimilable to the present, but to which we are somehow indebted.

the cheese and the Worms

The thread and the traces. The true, the false, the fictitious

The truth can only be a synthesis. And the way to find that alchemy of truth can ultimately only come from the crucible where everything human is dumped. The result is an exuberant channel of influences between the mythical, the mystical, the scientific, the rational and the irrational. Reality and fiction, subjectivism committed to the fullness of the objective. The dream of the reason produces monsters. But you have to live with them if you want some certainty...

To explore the multiple relationships between historical truth, falsehood and fiction, Carlo Ginzburg explores very heterogeneous themes: Jews from Menorca and Brazilian cannibals, shamans and antique dealers, medieval romances, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, photography and death Voltaire, Stendhal, Flaubert, Auerbach, Kracauer, Montaigne. Against the tendency of postmodern skepticism to blur the border between fictional narratives and historical narratives, the author addresses this relationship as a dispute over the representation of reality, a conflict made up of challenges, reciprocal loans, and hybridizations.

The thread and the traces. The true, the false, the fictitious

Big wooden eyes: Nine reflections on the distance

In clear conflict with the most blinding ethnocentrism. The comfort zone of humanity is the recognition of one's own as something impregnable. The world reduced to the tribe and the contours of its homeland. Despite globalization, the drive for reductio ad absurdum seems to be growing. The trip and the knowledge of other places may not make us better but it can certainly make us wiser, not so much about others, but about the best we could be by always remaining in our environment.

In this book Carlo Ginzburg investigates, from various points of view, the cognitive and moral, constructive and destructive potentialities of uprooting and distance. Why has a long tradition attributed to the gaze of the stranger (of the savage, of the peasant, of the animal) the ability to reveal the fallacy of society? Why has style been used in many cases to include or exclude the culturally different? Big eyes of wood offer us new perspectives on all this and on the world, near and far from us.

Big wooden eyes: Nine reflections on the distance
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