Il Conciliatore

The “azure page”, as the Il Conciliatore was called on account of the colour of the paper used for printing, was published in Milan twice weekly from September 1818 to October 1819, when it was forced to shut down by the Austrian police. It was financed by two liberal nobles, the Marquis Luigi Porro Lambertenghi and Count Federico Confalonieri, who together with the editors Silvio Pellico and Pietro Borsieri (who set up the plan of the “sheet on science and literature”) were sentenced at their trials for conspiracy against Austria in 1821. The other journalists were Ludovico di Breme and Giovanni Berchet, with several noteworthy contributors such as Ermes Visconti and Gian Domenico Romagnosi. Manzoni did not write for the paper, but shared its programme, based on the cultural and social commitment underlying the Enlightenment publication Il Caffè set up by the Verri brothers and Beccaria. The Conciliatore aimed at moving beyond the Romantic polemic, rejected “literature of bare words” and “merely grammatical disputes”, and intended to be of public benefit, above all in the key sectors of Lombardy’s economic progress, such as agriculture, trade and industry. The cultural but mainly political aim was to “educate” the Lombard middle classes (with articles on legislation, scientific and technological advances, exploration in new lands) and to increase its potential. Borsieri explained in the programme (foreshadowing Manzoni’s formulation in his letter on Romanticism) that literature was to serve as a pleasurable and interesting means of transferring useful content of this sort to the people (indicating, like Madame de Staël, the theatre as one of the most suitable “media” for public improvement). The periodical published articles on innovations in European theatre and issues related to the novel. In his veiled allusions in the first Introduzione to Fermo e Lucia and the first draft of his narrative masterpiece, Manzoni is clearly nodding to his friends on the Conciliatore.