Pietro Amat di San Filippo

He was born to a noble Sardinian family of Catalan origin.^[1] He was the fourth of fifteen siblings, the children of Giuseppe Amat di San Filippo. Cardinal Luigi Amat di San Filippo e Sorso was his uncle. He married Donna Angela Musio, daughter of a judge and Senator, and they had seven children.^[2]

He studied at the Barnabites High School in Bologna, then undertook a diplomatic career as a secretary of legation to the Holy See in 1851.^[3] Later he left diplomacy and became an officer of the Sardinian National Archive (Archivio di Stato) in his hometown. In these years he undertook studies in geography and became a member of the Italian Geographical Society. Due to his interest and his publications in economics, he was appointed a secretary of the Ministry of Finance in Rome, where he ended his career.^[4]

All Amat's works were printed in Italian; in order to provide a better understanding of their content to the English reader, in the following list titles are translated into English.

• Trade and navigation of the island of Sardinia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: with some unreleased or rare documents (1865)
• The colonies in Sardinia: especially those established under the government of Savoy (1738-1824) and the convenience of promoting colonization as the primary tool of economic refurbishing on islands (1867)
• General Statistical Yearbook and the island of Sardinia for calendar year 1868 (1868, editor)
• Illustrated Bibliography of Italian travelers in chronological order (1874)
• The planisphere of Bartolomeo Pareto 1455 and four other charts have just been found in the library of Vittorio Emanuele in Rome (1878, from "Memoirs of the Geographical Society" excerpt)
• World Map, drawn in 1436 by the Venetian Bianco (preserved in the Marciana in Venice): the notes (1879, excerpt from "Maritime Magazine”)
• Navigations and maritime discoveries in West Africa by Italians along the XIII, XIV and XV centuries (1880, excerpt from the "Bulletin of the Italian Geographical Society”)
• World maps, nautical charts, pilot books and other cartographic monument, especially Italian, of the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries (1882, with Gustavo Uzielli: second part of the biographical and bibliographical studies on the history of geography in Italy, published on the occasion of the third International Geographical Society Congress)
• Two unpublished letters of Italian adventurers in America (1534) (1885, excerpt from the "Bulletin of the Italian Geographical Society”)
• The distinguished Italian travelers: with an anthology of their writings (1885)
• Of ancient and modern relations between Italy and India (1886, awarded by the Accademia dei Lincei)
• Recent finds of nautical charts in Paris, London and Florence (1888)
• The real discoverers of the Azore Islands (1892, excerpt from the "Bulletin of the Italian Geographical Society")
• Italian bibliography on Christopher Columbus, the discovery of the New World and traveling in America (1893, collaboration with Giuseppe Fumagalli: the sixth volume of the collection of published documents and studies by the Royal Colombian Commission)
• Of slavery and serfdom in Sardinia (1894, from the "Italian history Miscellaneous" excerpt)
• Surveys and studies on the economic history of Sardinia (1902, posthumous)