CAFFÈ (IL). — The first journal of collective collaboration, a direct expression of the Milanese « Accademia dei Pugni », founded in the Verri household, and consequently of the « Società del Caffè », published in Brescia every ten days, from 1 June 1764 through the end of May 1766.
Its eleven collaborators, among them the brothers P. and A. Verri and C. Beccaria, treated in witty and at times paradoxical form, in keeping with eighteenth-century taste, subjects relating to public economy, legislation, agriculture, natural history, medicine, miscellaneous literature, and morality, while avoiding politics and religion. The articles were presented as reports of discussions among the patrons of the imaginary café opened in Milan by a Greek exile: hence the title.
The C., widely circulated in Italy and abroad, provoked lively controversies, especially with Baretti; it then ceased publication because of disagreements between A. Verri and C. Beccaria.
Faithful to the watchword deeds, not words, the « caffettanti » fought strenuously against every kind of authority and prejudice, in favor of sincerity and freedom of opinion, anticipating the program of the Conciliatore (v.).
The C. has been reproached for the Gallicism of the content of certain articles and for its neglect of form. Yet far more substantial contradictions could be pointed out, were it not recognized that the journal’s vitality lies precisely in the subtle and concealed antithesis between the generally Enlightenment-oriented approach to its problems and the pre-Romantic sensibility of its inquiry. Faith in the illuminating power of reason explains the anti-Arcadian, anti-Purist, and anti-pedantic struggle undertaken by the writers of the C. against all the debris of the past, as well as their keen need for a firm moral consciousness. But, especially in A. Verri, there is also a perceptible tendency to listen, beyond definitional clarity, to the voice of the « inner sense », that is, the « path of the heart », and to recognize the priority of inspiration and feeling over reason. Thus, alongside a rational declaration of the C.’s cosmopolitan Europeanism (wrongly regarded as a renunciation of Italian identity), one may find, as in Carli’s well-known article on the Patria degli Italiani, Romantic anticipations in the assertion of the uniqueness of the Italian nation, historically and concretely defined.
Ettore Li Gotti