When he joined the founders of La Civiltà Cattolica Bresciani already had a large literary production and was a member of the prestigious Academy of Arcadia, under the pseudonym Tionide Nemesiano.

During his tenure as literary editor at La Civiltà Cattolica, Bresciani launched his serialised trilogy of anti-Masonic novels: The Jew of Verona (1851), The Roman Republic and Lionello (1855).

His novels were published in serial form in the feuilleton section of La Civiltà Cattolica — at that time the paper with the widest circulation in Italy, with more than 60,000 subscribers.

Bresciani had understood that to keep Italian youth close to the Catholic Church it was not enough to provide lives of the saints, catechisms and moral literature, but full scale 'lay' novels whose religious content was far more subtly inserted.

His novel L'Ebreo di Verona, published in the first six volumes of Civiltà Cattolica from 1850 to 1851,[7][8] was enormously popular and was quickly translated into most European languages, including English, French, German, and Portuguese.

L'Ebreo di Verona treated the influence of secret societies during the Italian Revolution of 1848, revealing the presence of dark Masonic forces working behind the scenes to foment the nationalist movements that would erupt into mass revolt.

[10] A follower of Antonio Cesari, the most renowned among Italian purists,[11] Bresciani was a staunch opponent of Romanticism, that he coinsidered an outgrowth of liberal, revolutionary ideology.

[17] Bresciani's theories are characteristic of the “paranoid style” in politics, positing a Satanic conspiracy among secret societies and Jews to undermine the Christian order.

[5] According to some scholars, Bresciani's highly popular novel L'Ebreo di Verona shaped religious anti-Semitism for decades in Italy, as did his work for La Civiltà Cattolica, which he helped launch.