Giuseppe Pecchio was a member of the Adelphi Society (or Philadelphi), a secret society inspired to freemasonry but with revolutionary intentions. This society had been born after the ``Napoleonic disillusion", i.e. after Napoleon crowned himself emperor and stopped being an anti-monarchic symbol. Up until Napoleon was successful these societies were useful to Austria in order to discredit Napoleon, so they were left standing and sometimes encouraged financially by all the anti-Napoleonic powers. After Napoleon's fall the societies were not dismantled, but changed their goals. Their final pursuit was democracy; at any rate they were anti-Austria. The Adelphi Society was to northern Italy what the Carboneria was to southern Italy, and there is strong evidence that the two societies were tightly linked. The head of the Adelphi Society was Filippo Buonarroti, often referred to as Michelangelo Buonarroti. He escaped to Geneva in 1814, where he taught Italian and Singing, and where he remained until 1823. He was trying to coordinate all the secret societies of Switzerland, France and Italy to make them all flow into the Adelphi Society. As far as Italy is concerned, in a meeting held in Alessandria in 1818 the Adelphi Society and the Philadelphi lodges fused together into the Society of Perfect Sublime Masters.
The Perfect Sublime Masters were divided in three categories, each of which had its own goals without knowing the goals of the next superior category and in particular the goals of the third category, which was extra-secret and composed of a very small number of people. The first category wanted a democratic monarchy, the second wanted the republic, and the third communism. Buonarroti thought that it was only possible to reach the ultimate goal, communism, through gradual reformations (and hence the organizations in three degrees). The first category should have freed northern Italy from Austrian occupation, the second should have organized the republic, and only after that should the third have introduced communism. In this sense, the southern Italian Carboneria became a sub-society of the first degree, whose goal was to destabilize Austrian authority.