CAFFÈ (IL). - The first journal of collective collaboration, a direct expression of the Milanese "Accademia dei Pugni," founded in the house of the Verri family, and therefore of the "Società del Caffè," published in Brescia, every 10 days, from June 1, 1764, to the end of May 1766.
Its 11 contributors, among them the brothers P. and A. Verri and C. Beccaria, treated in it, in a witty and at times paradoxical form, in keeping with eighteenth-century taste, subjects of public economy, legislation, agriculture, natural history, medicine, various literature and morals, avoiding those of politics and religion. The articles were presented as reports of discussions among the frequenters of the imaginary coffee-house opened in Milan by a Greek exile: whence the title.
The C., widely circulated in Italy and abroad, provoked lively polemics, especially with Baretti; then it ceased publication because of disagreements between A. Verri and C. Beccaria.
Faithful to the watchword deeds and not words, the "caffettanti" struggled strenuously against every kind of authority and prejudice, in favor of sincerity and freedom of opinion, forestalling the program of the Conciliatore (v.).
The C. has been reproached for the Gallophilia of the content of certain articles and for carelessness of form. But far more substantial contradictions could be pointed out, were one not to perceive that precisely in the subtle and hidden antithesis between the generally Enlightenment framing of the problems and the pre-Romantic sensibility of the inquiry lies the vitality of the journal. 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, and the lively need for a firm moral conscience. But there is also perceptible, especially in A. Verri, the tendency to listen, beyond definitory clarity, to the voice of the "inner sense," that is, the "road of the heart," to recognize the priority of inspiration and feeling over reason. Therefore, alongside a rational declaration of cosmopolitan Europeanism on the part of the C. (wrongly held to be an abdication of Italianness) one can find, as in Carli's well-known article on the Patria degli Italiani, Romantic foreshadowings in the affirmation of the uniqueness of the Italian nation historically and concretely identified.
Bibliography5 works
Ettore Li Gotti