On this page you can find some essential information about Davide Amante and some copyright-free images.
Note: When approaching the biography of a writer, I mean a great writer, you should simply read his books. Any other attempt at synthesis is limiting. You have to imagine yourself as that good doctor at the psychiatric hospital in Jena, who on the evening shift in 1889 sees a certain Friedrich Nietzsche arrive for admission and takes him in to fill out the anamnesis in his medical record, which will be used by other colleagues to classify the patient and provide him with the most appropriate care. The good doctor, not knowing Nietzsche but having spoken for a few minutes with the patient, wrote as is well known: “The patient shows evident paranoid signs of megalomania: he declares himself to be a great philosopher.” In the same way this short biography is a bit limiting but at least the facts are accurate.
Biography
Davide Amante was born in Milan in 1970. He is a literary fiction writer, he has written four novels translated in six countries.
In 2025 Davide Amante is writing Phenomenology of a Free Man. An epic, grandiose novel. A journey across life, in search of the moment, of the meaning of living. Written in the first person, with a direct prose, revolutionary in its construction, Phenomenology of a Free Man is part of that direct, emotional and soulful prose that has distinguished Céline, Kerouac, Miller and others. Phenomenology is the study and classification of phenomena, as they manifest themselves to experience in time and space. Phenomenology of a Free Man starts from a distant sunset to go deep and cross a series of surprising events and encounters with unexpected characters, developed along a fast-paced plot. A fascinating and imposing journey that reveals all the strength of living.
Davide Amante lives and writes in the historic center of Milan, Italy, with his wife Fatine Amante and two daughters.
He was educated literaryly from a very young age in his father’s imposing library, consisting of over twelve thousand novels and works. “The rule of the library of my childhood was eclecticism, any theme and any style as long as you could feel life flowing through the pages. My father bought books compulsively, with the same naivety and authenticity with which a child chooses model airplanes in a toy store. His sensitivity for art and literature allowed him to build an exceptional library. I was a rather solitary child, in the sense that even though I had many friends I didn’t mind being alone at all and spending entire afternoons discovering the shelves of books, often the most interesting books were found on the lowest and the highest shelves. I was fascinated by the most unexpected combinations, Rabelais, Pound, Marquez, Sciascia, Whitman and then Anais Nin, Dostoevsky, Melville, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Stendhal and Proust, and then Borges, Papini, Cortazar, Singer, Bukowski. All this on a single shelf, then we started again with the others. Breathtaking. I read everything. I absorbed everything.”
“My mother was involved, with a certain recklessness, in a contemporary art gallery. She was involved in two or three galleries over the years, which were the years of the Arte Povera and Transavanguardia. Instead of playing with other children in the courtyard, I found myself at parties or dinners at home with Mimmo Palladino, Gilberto Zorio, Luciano Fabro, Antonio Paradiso, Luciano Comini, Yasmin Brandolini d’Adda. Not to mention the art critics of the moment and gallery owners. My mother lived that world with the same naturalness with which you might ask someone to get you a glass of water, in short she was constantly in and out of it with remarkable nonchalance, between a weekend in Switzerland and a trip to Africa.”
“Between my father’s books and my mother’s galleries, the atmosphere of my childhood was rather restless.”
He attended the renowned Vittoria Colonna Institute, the American School of Milan, the Berchet High School and enrolled in the Faculty of Literature at the University of Milan, which he soon abandoned to devote himself full time to writing.
In the early years he collaborated in various capacities with Mcgraw-hill, Saet Editrice, White Star Publishing, Studio Editoriale Buysschaert & Malerba, Vallardi, Leopard Publishing, Mondadori and Penguin Random. He collaborated with the Polytechnic of Milan, at the invitation of the Department of Architecture, teaching the interpretation and transposition of literary works in theatrical and cinematographic scenic settings.
He collaborates with DMA International for the creation of screenplays and film productions.
He declined McGraw-Hill’s offer to move to the United States for them as well as other job opportunities with publishing groups. “Everything about a regular life and career was infinitesimal to me, I could do nothing else in life but try to understand its meaning, push myself to its maximum limit and write, everything else boring me terribly.”
In the early 1990s there is the African period. Passionate about the desert, he crosses the Sahara on five expeditions through Algeria, Mali, Niger, Mauritania and Morocco. He travels the baliseés pistes and the ancient salt caravans of the Touareg, such as the route between Hassi-Messaud-Tamanrasset-Djanet, the renowned Bidon Cinq of over 1500km of absolute emptiness up to the Atlantic coasts of Morocco.
He lives for a short period in the 1990s in Tuscany, where he builds and refines his literary style, “To learn to write you simply need to read and a lot. It is in this way that you eliminate the superfluous and learn to feel and see with the simplicity of a child. I explored life, I was only interested in writing.”
Picasso said ‘It took me a lifetime to learn to paint like a child’ and de Saint-Exupéry ‘You have to learn not so much to write but to see. Writing is a consequence’.
In the second half of the 1990s he collaborates with various publishing houses and begins the period of the Strait of Bonifacio. Passionate about sailing, he becomes an instructor and then trainer of instructors at the Centro Velico Caprera. He founds a Cetacean Research Center and thanks to private and public sponsors, he crosses the Mediterranean alone on a sailing boat and then leaves the center and writes Altair at the end of this period of navigation.
In the 2000s he made several trips but always declared “Travels, however fascinating, are nothing. The only true journey is the interior one, that is where the greatest distances are covered”.
It is a period of great reading, writing and literary refinement. Perhaps his most emblematic phrase of this period is “The horizon line, towards which we are incessantly directed, continues to move with us, becoming more distant the further we go, an essential solitary goal of our life.”
At the end of the 2000s he met Fatine, his literary muse. “Never met, never even imagined I could meet a girl capable of unleashing so much love, so much passion, so much inspiration in me”. The couple has two daughters.
He loves sports cars and has his own private collection.
Davide Amante
