For decades, postmodern skeptics have argued that it is impossible to strictly distinguish between truth and fiction, and that history should be identified with rhetoric. But what kind of rhetoric are we talking about? In a polemic with relativists, the renowned historian Carlo Ginzburg shows that postmodern skepticism was inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's early work on truth and falsehood, in which rhetoric, contrary to Aristotle, was decisively opposed to evidence. However, in the tradition founded by Aristotle and then running from Quintilian to Lorenzo Valle, the connection between rhetoric and evidence is central. By highlighting the differences between the two versions of rhetoric, Ginzburg offers a new perspective on a wide variety of subjects: a speech against European colonialism delivered by a native rebel and included in the work of an 18th-century French Jesuit; The blank lines in the famous novel 'Sentimental Education,' which Proust considered the culmination of Flaubert's entire oeuvre; the winding path that led Picasso to 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.' The author's goal is to demonstrate that within historical science, the need for proof still exists, and historical knowledge is still possible.