AMÀRI, MICHELE. — Patriot, historian, and Orientalist, born in Palermo in 1806, died in Florence in 1889; he was 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 bears in its first editions 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 his knowledge of Arabic and Byzantine studies at the flourishing French school and to construct the other two great works on 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 Arabic texts concerning Sicily (1857–87).
Having returned to Italy in 1859, after the annexation of Tuscany, he devoted himself not only to teaching Arabic in Florence, which he continued until 1873, but also to completing his major works, preparing the second edition of the Storia, which he brought almost to completion through a painstaking process of additions and corrections (recently printed and updated under the direction of C. A. Nallino, Catania 1933–39), and producing another series of important works on relations between the Muslims and Italy. He held many political offices, from 1848 onward in Palermo, then in Florence and Rome (he was made a senator in 1861), with admirable zeal, integrity, and competence. He was an eminent Arabist and Islamologist; his Storia is a masterpiece of Italian historiographical literature, not only because of its learned use of all the Arabic and Byzantine sources, but also because of the vigor of its construction and the nobility of its style. He had the great merit of promoting Arabic and Oriental studies in Italy through his example, teaching, and concrete support for them, also in his capacity as Minister of Public Instruction, a position he held from 1862 to 1864.
The first volume of the Storia dei Musulmani was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1855 because, alongside undeniable historical and literary merits, it is dominated by anticlerical prejudices, from which derive many serious errors in the assessment of facts and persons, at times even in matters of dogma. Cf. P. Bottalla, in La Civiltà Cattolica, 2ª serie, IX (1855, 1), p. 70.