Founded by the brothers Pietro and Alessandro Verri, Il Caffè came out every ten days from June 1764 to May 1766.

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.

[1][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.

[2] 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).

[3][4] 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.