AMARI, MICHELE. - Patriot, historian, orientalist, b. in Palermo in 1806, d. in Florence in 1889, one of the principal agitators for the liberation of Sicily from Bourbon rule. Having fled to France in 1842, after the publication of the famous Storia della guerra del Vespro (which in its first editions bears the title: Un periodo delle storie siciliane del sec. XIII), he took advantage of his exile in Paris, which lasted until 1848 and then again from 1849 to 1856, to perfect himself at the flourishing French school in Arabic and Byzantine studies and to construct his other two great works of Sicilian history, the Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia (1851-72), to which his fame is especially linked, and the Biblioteca arabo-sicula, a collection and translation of the Arabic texts concerning Sicily (1857-87).
Having returned to Italy in 1859, after the annexation of Tuscany, he devoted himself not only to his teaching of Arabic in Florence, which he held until 1873, but also to the completion of his major works, to the preparation of the second edition of the Storia, which he brought almost to completion with a most diligent work of additions and corrections (recently printed and updated under the editorship of C. A. Nallino, Catania 1933-39), and to another series of important works on the relations between the Muslims and Italy. He held many political offices, from 1848 in Palermo, then in Florence and in Rome (he was made senator in 1861), with admirable zeal, integrity and competence. He was a distinguished Arabist and Islamicist; his Storia is a masterpiece of Italian historiographical literature, not only for the skilful use of all the Arabic and Byzantine sources, but also for the vigour of its construction and the nobility of its form. He had the great merit of promoting Arabic and Oriental studies in Italy, by his example, his teaching and the concrete support given to them, also in his office as minister of Public Instruction, which he held from 1862 to 1864.
Of the Storia dei Musulmani the first volume was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1855, because, alongside undeniable historical and literary merits, anticlerical prejudices dominate in it, from which derive many grave errors in the evaluation of facts and persons, sometimes even in matters of dogma. Cf. P. Bottalla, in La Civiltà Cattolica, 2nd series, IX (1855, 1), p. 70.
Bibliography3 works
Michelangelo Guidi