Its founders were wealthy members of the city's leading families, politically supportive of the Piedmontese First Minister, Count Cavour's unification strategy.
Beneath its title early editions of La Perseveranza carried the motto "Usque ad finem" ("On to completion" / "On to the end").
Valussi handed over control to Ruggero Bonghi, who on occasion displayed a formidable capacity for polemical journalism, and who demonstrated no great respect for Umberto I of Italy after 1878.
In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, in 1870, Bonghi used La Perseveranza to insist that the inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine must be permitted to vote in a referendum before any decision could be taken to transfer the territories from France to Germany.
[5] On the home front he was an acute observer of Italian political trends, and sought in the newspaper's columns to oppose the crushing of the political right in the region threatened between 1862 and 1864 by conflict between the haut bourgeois "Pietmontese party" and the more aristocratically focused "Tuscan Party" centred on Florence, and the tendency to respond to crises outside parliament, in ways that he believed caused major damage to the new representative institutions of the Italian constitution.