Riflessioni sulla lingua e sul rapporto con la censura austriaca nel Conciliatore (1818-1819)

The essay examines the metalinguistic reflections present in the Conciliatore, a scientific and literary periodical published in Milan between 1818 and 1819. The periodical is animated by a group of intellectuals from Lombardy and Piedmont, convinced supporters of romantic ideas and a rationalism, that appeals to the dogmatic classicism still widespread in Italy in the early 19th century. Through a series of examples from articles in the Conciliatore, it is highlighted the content of these metalinguistic reflections: the ridiculing of positions of blind obsequiousness towards the example of the ancients (the ideas of Bembo and the Crusca, in the case of the Italian language); and the linguistic tools through which these reflections are put forward: dialogicality, the high rate of figurality, the opposition between deictic planes and the use of semantically ambivalent terms. So, the literary fiction used in the Conciliatore seems functional in supporting romantic theses, through precise rhetorical and pragmatic devices.