Micro-history is a distinctive approach to historical writing that focuses on a very small unit of historical investigation, such as an individual, a family, a village, a community, a trial, an event, or a particular social group, in order to understand wider historical processes. The term emerged prominently in Italy during the 1970s and became associated with a group of historians who sought to challenge the dominance of large-scale, structural and generalising interpretations of history. Instead of beginning with broad categories such as “the state,” “the class,” “the economy,” or “society,” micro-historians often begin with a seemingly insignificant person or event and reconstruct its context in considerable detail. Through this detailed investigation, they attempt to reveal dimensions of the past that may remain invisible in conventional macro-historical narratives. The development of micro-history was closely connected with the broader transformation of historical scholarship in the twentieth century. The Annales School had already encouraged historians to move beyond political events and study social, economic, cultural and mental structures. Historians such as Fernand Braudel emphasised long-term structures and large geographical and economic systems. Micro-history accepted the importance of social and cultural history but questioned whether very large-scale models could adequately explain the complexity of individual experience. Micro-historians argued that broad historical categories sometimes conceal differences, contradictions and individual choices. Therefore, studying a small historical unit intensively could provide a more complex understanding of society. The Italian origins of micro-history are particularly important. The approach developed around the journal *Quaderni Storici* and the work of historians such as Carlo Ginzburg, Giovanni Levi, Edoardo Grendi and Carlo Poni. These historians did not constitute a completely uniform school, but they shared an interest in detailed research, local history, exceptional cases, archival evidence and the relationship between individual action and broader social structures. Carlo Ginzburg is one of the most influential historians associated with micro-history. His most famous work, *The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller* (1976), examines the life and ideas of an Italian miller named Domenico Scandella, commonly known as Menocchio. Menocchio was investigated by the Inquisition because of his unusual religious and cosmological beliefs. Ginzburg used the surviving Inquisition records to reconstruct Menocchio's intellectual world and demonstrate how popular culture interacted with learned culture. The significance of *The Cheese and the Worms* lies not simply in the biography of one miller but in the methodological possibilities offered by an individual case. Through Menocchio, Ginzburg explored literacy, oral culture, popular religion, intellectual exchange and the circulation of ideas in early modern Europe. He demonstrated that ordinary people were not merely passive recipients of elite culture. They could interpret, transform and sometimes resist dominant ideas. The study therefore shows how a micro-level investigation can illuminate much broader cultural processes. Ginzburg's methodological ideas were also developed in his essay collection *Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method*. He proposed an evidential or “clue” paradigm in which historians reconstruct the past from small, apparently insignificant traces. This method resembles the reasoning of a