He is best known for Il formaggio e i vermi (1976, English title: The Cheese and the Worms), which examined the beliefs of an Italian heretic, Menocchio, from Montereale Valcellina.

[4] Along with Paul Ginsborg, Marcello Flores, Sergio Luzzatto, Claudio Pavone, Enzo Traverso, etc., Ginzburg called, in January 2002, for the rejection of a bill, presented by Justice Minister Clemente Mastella, that would have outlawed Holocaust denial.

[7] In The Night Battles and Ecstasies, Ginzburg traced a complex path from certain European witch persecutions to the benandanti and a wide variety of practices which he describes as evidence of a substrate of shamanic cults in Europe.

His book was not only about Sofri but was also a general reflection on the scientific methods used by a historian, and their similarity to the work of a judge, who also has to correlate testimonies with material evidence in order to deduce what really happened.

Thus, he explains how the judicial model of early historiography made it focus on easily verifiable facts, resulting in studies that centred on individuals or on what Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch called in the Annales d'histoire économique et sociale an "evenemential history".