The romantic intellectual group that founded the journal ``Il Conciliatore" in september 1818 and published it until october 1919 inspired their ideas to the journal ``Il Caffè", founded some fifty years before. Italian Romanticism was anti-classicist but not against Illuminism. Whilst in Germany Romanticism tended to emphasize emotion against reason, in Italy the romantic illuministic groups wanted to create a new, ``popularised" literature, as opposed to the ``court" literature and knowledge. The XVII century literature had developed, through an imitation of the Classics, pedantic rhetorics and petty erudition. The most acclaimed poets of 1600 wrote epic poems up to 10,000 lines long, sacrificing taste to display of classic knowledge. Rhetoric figures were abused in order to surprise the reader up to the point that some writer incited the ``smiths' fires to sweat in order to produce weapons". The group of the ``Conciliatore" wanted to invent a prose that could be understood by everybody. The articles of the ``Conciliatore" ranged from art to science, from philology to fiction, and they were always written with the primary purpose of easy communication. The style was usually stripped of all rhetorical contraptions which were not totally clear. The program of the journal, written by Pietro Borsieri, says that ``Since a very long time ago, the true knowledge has been property reserved to a restricted few, who from time to time shared some of it with the less cultured people. More often petty erudition and mere pedantry took over philology, philosophical criticism, and true literature. [...] To the people's ears often nothing came but faint voices of it. [...] Moved by these considerations, some literary men living in these cities [Milan] have decided to offer the the Italian People a new journal titled `Il Conciliatore', in which they will try to tackle with common experience the aforementioned disciplines."
It is not clear how Mossotti first came in contact with liberal ideas and intellectual groups. He wrote in 1819 four articles for the ``Conciliatore": a review of a divulgative astronomy book (X5), an article about comets in general and some recent discoveries (X6), an article about some engineering works in the Redefosso river (X7), and a philological review of a book about some of Galileo's minor works (X8).
The funding for the publication of the journal came mostly from progressive
noblemen, like the Count Luigi Porro-Lambertenghi. Codazza reports that
Mossotti was a friend of his and that he attended the salotti meetings
he organized. In M9 we learn that he also attended some other liberal
salotto, that of Didina Calderara, who escaped to Geneva
after 1821. It is difficult to understand how Mossotti entered the liberal
intellectual salotti. There is in M16 a reference to a letter that
Didina Calderara wrote to the Brera astronomers, but on the other hand Barnaba
Oriani, First Astronomer until about 1815 but working occasionally in the
Observatoire until his death (1832), was very faithful to the Austrian
Government, up to the point of risking his career and life for refusing to
declare faith to Napoleon during the period of his occupation. The obituary of
Zanobi Bicchierai only adds to the confusion, depicting Barnaba Oriani as a
sort of revolutionary element, which he clearly was not. However Mossotti
established the first contacts with those circles, once he was in he became
acquainted with all the most important liberals of northern Italy. When
writing for the ``Conciliatore" he met Giuseppe Pecchio.