Count Pietro Verri (12 December 1728 – 28 June 1797) was an economist, historian, philosopher and writer. Among the most important personalities of the 18th-century Italian culture, he is considered among the fathers of the Lombard reformist Enlightenment and the most important pre-Smithian authority on cheapness and plenty. Early life Pietro Verri was born to a conservative noble family the eldest son of Gabriele Verri and Barbara Dati Della Somaglia, in a house of the Archinto in via Stampa 19 in Milan, then under Austrian rule. He had three brothers: Alessandro, Carlo and Giovanni. After the death of his brother, Carlo, he raised his nephew Luigi Castiglioni and greatly influenced the young man. He studied in the Jesuit college in Monza, five years (1740–44) in the college of Barnabites in San Alessandro in Milan and two years (1744–45) in Rome in the college of Nazareno run by the Scolopi order. He received a strong religious education, from which he began to rebel when he reached his twenties. He volunteered to serve in the Seven Years' War in order to escape his father's decision to register him for legal studies but quit after a year. In mid-September 1759, he met the economist Henry Lloyd and developed a lifelong friendship with Henry Lloyd. Verri soon became convinced that Political Economy had to be at the center of all serious social and political interests. In his early life, he translated Destouches' works and wrote satirical almanacs (Borlanda impasticciata, Gran Zoroastro and Mal di Milza) which scandalized the Milanese society. Verri's early steps in educating himself in the science of civil society were guided by four eighteenth-century intellectual giants of the Enlightenment: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and Helvétius. In combination, these particularly informed his emerging views on law and civil society, the importance of historical understanding, his utilitarian tendencies and, more specifically, economic issues associated with trade, money, credit, and taxation. In 1761, together with his brother Alessandro, he founded a literary association, the Società dei Pugni ("Society of the Fists"), and, from 1764, published the magazine Il Caffè ("The Coffeehouse"). Pietro Verri was the founder, leader, and active contributor to both. Il Caffe appeared between 1764 and 1766 in successive magazines made in two volumes. Magazine 10 of Volume 1 has an article by Pietro Verri devoted to thoughts on the spirit of Italian Literature Here Verri describes Galileo-Newtonianism at