| Publisher: | Giammaria Rizzardi |
| Founder: | Pietro Verri |
| Founded: | 1764 |
| Firstdate: | June 1764 |
| Finaldate: | May 1766 |
| Based: | Milan |
| Language: | Italian |
| Issn: | 1125-0178 |
Il Caffè (Italian, 'The Coffeehouse') was magazine headquartered in Milan between 1764 and 1766. It was the most significant publication of the Enlightenment period in the country.
Il Caffè was first published in June 1764.[1] To evade Austrian censorship, the magazine was printed in Brescia (then belonging to the Republic of Venice). The original run consisted of 74 numbers. These were collected into two volumes. Founded by the brothers Pietro and Alessandro Verri, Il Caffè came out every ten days from June 1764 to May 1766.[2] [3] It was influenced by the thought of the French philosophes and exerted a notable influence on contemporary Italian culture and political life. Consciously evoking Addison's and Steele's Spectator, the journal shared with the English paper a use of irony as a weapon against contemporary morals and customs, but was imbued with a more immediate political purpose.[4]
The articles dealt with a wide range of subjects, from natural history to medicine, philosophy, music, ethics, law, and literature, all expounding the same theme: the need for social, economic, and political reform. A notable contributor to Il Caffè was the philosopher and economist Cesare Beccaria, author of the influential treatise Dei delitti e delle pene (1764; On Crimes and Punishments). Among its other contributors were the economists Gian Rinaldo Carli, Carlo Sebastiano Franci and Alfonso Longo, the mathematician Paolo Frisi, the polymath Roger Joseph Boscovich and the optician François de Baillou. Il Caffè was lambasted by Baretti, but it gained favor all over Europe. The magazine was folded in May 1766 due to disputes between Verri and Beccaria.