This book explores the changing relationship between historical truth, fiction and lies through a series of cases. And it takes a bold stand against naive positivism and allegedly sophisticated neo-skepticism. It looks deeply into questions raised by decades of post-structuralism: What constitutes historical truth? How do we draw a boundary between truth and fiction? What is the relationship between history and memory? How do we grapple with the historical conventions that inform, in different ways, all written documents? In his answers, Ginzburg peels away layers of subsequent readings and interpretations that envelop every text to make a larger argument about history and fiction.

His retrospective becomes also a personal self-questioning: Using the example of the Witches' Sabbath, Ginzburg tells of the storybooks of his childhood and of his mother Natalia. And he asks himself whether it was not also his own Jewish family and the fate of his father that made him choose again and again the victims of persecution as the subject of his work.

Historians, Aristotle wrote, speak of what has been (of the true), poets of what might have been (of the possible). But the true is the end point, not a starting point. Historians (and, in a different way, poets) do by trade something that is part of everyone's life. Untangling the web of true, fake and false that is the fabric of our being in the world.

This book can be read as the sum of Carlo Ginzburg's works and, at the same time, invites us to rediscover one of the most interesting scholars of our time.