In his memoirs, Amari portrayed his paternal grandfather Michele as a wealthy attorney who lived "on the third floor" of a house in central Palermo, on the corner of Via del Cassaro and Strada della Mercede.

The first Count, whose position derived from the hereditary office of the administrator of the royal tobacco monopoly, added a rural villa of his own to the residential suburb of Piana dei Colli (Plain of the Hills), today a northern district of Palermo, on land purchased from the marquises della Torretta in 1720.

[6] Already from 1812 he claimed to remember the Duke of Orléans attending the nearby Mercedarian convent of Our Lady of Mercy [it] with his Bourbon wife in 1812, shielded from the Palermo crowd by the loaded guns of English infantry ostensibly for fear of pestilence.

[7] The future King of France lived in the then British protectorate of Sicily in 1808–1814 as an agent of the Foreign Office, and conferred with Victor Emmanuel I in Sardinia on joint action against Napoleon I.

Amari spent the subsequent years progressing through the ranks of civil administration, publishing translations of English authors (which earned him a letter of thanks from Walter Scott[10]), and reading widely with political intent.

[6] By 1837 he had prepared the outline of his principal work, a detailed investigation of the war of the Sicilian Vespers (1282–1302), which was conceived as a call to overthrowing the Bourbon rule in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

The publication was delayed by Amari's involvement in health administration during an outbreak of cholera in 1837 and by his subsequent transfer to Naples in 1838–40 where he carried out additional research in the state archives.

The book, first released in 1842 with a title that understated its message to bypass censorship, rapidly won a mass audience in Sicily and on the Italian mainland, and caused concern in the Neapolitan government.

[19][20] Against the background of Garibaldi's absence, the advance of Piedmontese troops into the Papal States, and the impatience of the Sicilian elites with the revolution,[21] it was Amari's monarchist option that ultimately prevailed.

His Storia dei musulmani di Sicilia (History of the Muslims of Sicily, 1854) has been translated into many languages, including into Arabic by a group of Egyptian scholars as recently as 2004.

Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer of the University of Leipzig, in publishing two supplements to Amari's Siculo-Arabic Library, credited him with reviving Oriental studies in Italy[citation needed].