If we wanted to capture the meaning of Carlo Ginzburg and his family’s relationship to antifascism, we could do no better than read Winter in the Abruzzi (1944), one of the finest stories by his mother, the celebrated writer Natalia Ginzburg.

His father, Leone Ginzburg, a scholar of Russian literature and one of the founders of the Einaudi publishing house, had been sentenced to internal exile in the village of Pizzoli, near L’Aquila, as a “civilian war internee” (as both an anti-fascist and a Jew.) For Natalia, those years remained a kind of exile: a peasant world that seemed almost suspended outside time, governed by the rhythm of the seasons, by snow and sunshine, by the sound of church bells and the various kinds of fire.

It was in that world, at once enchanting and frightening — marked by Girò’s village shop with candles and oranges, and their serving girl Crocetta’s “long stories about death and cemeteries” — that Leone and Natalia lived between 1940 and 1943. They wrote, and edited proofs for publisher Einaudi, while their children, Carlo, Andrea, and Alessandra, played on the floor. After the brief downfall of Benito Mussolini in summer 1943, Leone returned to Rome to join the Resistance. Later arrested while part of the clandestine editorial team of the anti-fascist newspaper Italia Libera, Leone Ginzburg died at the hands of his Nazi torturers in Rome’s Regina Coeli prison on February 5, 1944. Of that time in Pizzoli, Natalia would retain a memory suffused with melancholy happiness, forever overshadowed by “the horror of his solitary death” and “the anguish that preceded his death.”