ARMONIA (L') DELLA RELIGIONE CON LA CIVILTÀ. – Catholic journal of combat, founded in Turin in 1848. In fact directed by the priest Giacomo Margotti, the paper began publication on 4 July, initially twice a week and subsequently three times. Among its faithful collaborators were the marquis Fabio Invea, Gustavo di Cavour, Rosmini, and the future cardinal Gaetano Alimonda. Founded as an uncompromising safeguard of the lofty principles and even the temporal rights of the papacy and the Church, it soon established itself as the most highly regarded—and, in the eyes of its adversaries, feared—clerical organ in the peninsula, dealing with all the major religious and political problems of the time: from the laws concerning religious congregations to the wars of independence, from the discussions on the irremovability of bishops to the Eastern Question, from the Congress of Paris to civil marriage, from the abolition of ecclesiastical jurisdiction to the annexations and the proclamation of the Kingdom, and to all Cavour’s anti-ecclesiastical and anti-curial policy.
Enriched in 1850 with supplements, news items, and excellent weekly reviews of the press, in 1852 it changed its days of publication, also introducing a Sunday supplement, which was followed the following year by issues devoted exclusively to the dissemination of contemporary documents. In 1855 it finally became a daily with a new programme, and, from 1856, published the Effemeridi libertine, in order to keep alive the memory of liberalism’s secularizing reformist work in Piedmont. Suspended indefinitely by Cavour in 1859 and temporarily replaced by another paper, it reappeared in 1860 with an increasingly temporalist character and an ever more reactionary tendency; but it gradually and decisively declined, especially when, three years later, at the suggestion of Pius IX, Margotti founded the Unità Cattolica in that same Florence, where the A. also moved on 4 December 1866, bringing publication to an end shortly thereafter.