This coast has been named four times over. In Greek times two settlements are placed here: Temesa , generally located at what is now Campora San Giovanni, and Clampetia — also given as Lampetia — on the coastal plain, the only real sinus of the Cosentine Tyrrhenian shore, and attributed variously to Crotoniate colonists or to the Bruttii. The Roman-period name recorded for the site is Clampetia, and dates as early as 204 BC appear in the heritage catalogue.

When the Byzantines took Calabria they founded a fortified citadel in the area of what is now the old town and called it Nepetia — from Neos Pedion . In the ninth century the Arabs conquered it, renamed it Al-Mantiah and made it the seat of an emirate. When Nicephorus Phocas retook the town in 885 , the Arabic name stayed. It is still the town's name and still its dialect name.

In 1094 Duke Roger aggregated Amantea to the bishopric of Tropea . Norman, Swabian and Angevin rule followed, and the castle on the height above the town belongs to that period; it has survived not only sieges but repeated earthquakes, which is why its original form is hard to reconstruct.

What the town is remembered for locally is resistance. In 1269 the Amanteani held out against the advance of Charles of Anjou — the siege of Amantea became a symbol of local defiance. In the Napoleonic period it suffered two French invasions, the second only after a tenacious defence; local sources date that resistance to 1803 .

Throughout all of it, Amantea was not a fief. Apart from a brief spell in the mid-seventeenth century it remained a state city , governed by its own università under the crown — a genuinely unusual status in the Calabrian south, and one that shaped both its politics and its paperwork. In the early modern period a mint was established here by Francesco de Lauro , an important magistrate of the Kingdom.

The religious fabric is substantial for a town this size. The Collegiata di San Biagio , the chiesa matrice , stands at the centre of the old town, its parish church dated 1677 . The Franciscan convent and church of San Francesco d'Assisi stand just outside the centre, founded between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and visible from a distance for its octagonal dome; its first chapel holds a Madonna and Child by Gagini of 1505 . A Capuchin house was here too — by 1650 it held five friars in seventeen cells. And the Palazzo delle Clarisse looks out over the sea.

In 1861 Amantea became a comune of the Kingdom of Italy. In 1943 it was bombed by American aircraft, and after the war the town rebuilt and began the descent toward the coast that made it the modern seaside centre it is now.