[1] Amatore first came to notice when he was bought as a slave by Luigi Castagnone, the physician employed by Mohammed Ali Pasha, when he was about six years old.

[2] In 1836 Castagnone, who had been sentenced for life in native Kingdom of Sardinia for patriotic riots, was eventually pardoned and they left for Italy, when the boy settled with a friend of the doctor, Maurizio Bussa, when Castagnone flew again.

[4] There he became a Christian on 10 June 1838, receiving sacraments by the Bishop of Asti Michele Amatore Lobetti,[5] in homage to whom he took his name and the surname.

He enrolled as a soldier and marksman in the specialised Bersaglieri regiment of the Piedmontese army in 1848, when Amatore would have been about eighteen.

In 1848 and 1849 he and his regiment from northwest Italy were involved in a campaign against Austria during the first unrest that led to Italian unification.