Antonio Di Cicco was born in 1931 at Villalago, near L’Aquila. Few years later his family moved to Rome. Soon he developed a keen interest in literature. In the high school years, at the state Liceo Classico "Pilo Albertelli" in Rome, he was deeply influenced by his professor G.B.Salinari, a well-known historian of Italian literature. At the University, under the supervision of Prof. A.Schiaffini, he graduated in arts and humanities with a thesis on the relation between literary language and popular language in the theatre of Ruzante.
After the University Di Cicco settled in Tuscany, where he started his work of teacher. During the 1960s he contributed to some cultural radio programs and to the prestigious literary journal Il Ponte . For Il Ponte he regularly wrote reviews and articles on new authors. In those years he came into touch with Pisa’s university milieu. Pisa was to be one of the hubs of the 1968 student movement.
In 1973 Di Cicco came back to Rome, a city he would consider crucial to his literary work. He taught in some of the most politicized high schools during the 1977 student movement. His first novel, Homo Patients, originated in his confrontation with the youth’s uneasiness of the time. The novel was published in 1980 as a supplement of the Florence literary magazine Salvo Imprevisti. In fact, he was involved in the magazine project to explore the possibilities of an experimental and "unofficial" literature. Although of limited circulation, the book was well received. A very warm review was written by the literary critic Piero Santi.
In those very years, together with Prof. C.Venturi, he edited a series of little books for the high school published by Zanichelli. The objective of the series was to illustrate new trends and methods in Italian literature. Since 1981 four volumes appeared with the title, Lavorare su… autori e testi dell’Italia repubblicana, (Working on… Authors and texts of republican Italy). In 1983 a major work appeared, Antologia Operativa (An anthology at work) , perhaps the most fortunate and innovative of his text-books, written in cooperation with Venturi. Again with Venturi he wrote Dentro il testo (1988), another "unconventional" anthology of Italian literature, still much in use in the high school.
In 1986 appeared Di Cicco’s second novel Duale (Dual), published by Edizioni S.Marco. In 1989 he died after a sudden and violent disease. His third novel, Oltre il labirinto (Beyond the Labyrinth) was published by Marsilio posthumously. He had devoted more than one year to the first draft of this novel. It is apparent in its making the author’s deepening of philosophical motifs originated in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus. The labyrinth constitutes a powerful existential metaphor and Di Cicco, in this work, has compromised, as it were, his creative writing with a serious study based on some classics (Plutarcus’s Life of Theseus, Racine’s Phoedra, D’Annunzio, etc.) and some modern essays (Kereny, Santarcangeli, etc.). Oltre il Labirinto is certainly his most accomplished and interesting work.
Antonio Di Cicco has left a number of unpublished pages of stories and novels.