"Who built the seven-gated Thebes?" Historians have long learned—not only from Brecht's verses but also from the teachings of a Bloch or a Febvre—that history is the history of people, not of "great men," and that the past is best unraveled when we have the opportunity to reach the everyday truth. Carlo Ginzburg analyzes here the worldview of a miller from Friuli, who was led to the stake by the Inquisition at the end of the 16th century. His defense refers to a layer of dark rural mythologies that, grafted by readings of scholarly texts, open the door to millenarian expectations of justice and social renewal—as shown by his personal version of creation: "... Everything was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire together; and this mass slowly became a lump, just like cheese forms in milk, and from there worms were made, and they were the angels." Following the valuable insights of Bakhtin, we are thus dramatically led to the dichotomy of scholarly and popular culture, but also to the unexpected testimony of their cyclicality and interaction. (From the presentation on the back cover of the book) This book tells the story of Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, a follower of a strange sect from Friuli who was persecuted by the Inquisition. Thanks to the rich documentation provided by the archives of the latter in Udine, we are able to know his readings and discussions, his thoughts and feelings—fears, hopes, irony, anger, despair. Every so often, the immediacy of the sources brings him close to us: it makes him a person like us, one of us. But he is also a person very different from us. The analytical reconstruction of this difference was necessary in order to reconstruct the partially obscured character of his culture and the social framework within which it had developed... An investigation that initially revolved around a rather unusual individual eventually evolved into a general hypothesis about the popular culture (more precisely, the rural culture) of pre-industrial Europe, in the era marked by the spread of printing and the Protestant Reformation—and by the suppression of the latter in Catholic countries... 'The Cheese and the Worms' aims to be a story as well as a historical treatise. Thus, it addresses both the general reader and the specialist. It is likely that only the latter will read the notes—which have been deliberately placed at the end of the book, unnumbered, so as not to burden the narrative. However, I hope that both will recognize in this episode an unnoticed but extraordinary piece of a reality, partly lost, that indirectly poses a series of questions about our own culture and about ourselves. [Excerpt from the preface text]