ROME - The poet and engineer Francesco Terrone, a frequent contributor to the Insider, is among those who have been nominated by Italian President Sergio Mattarella for a knighthood of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

  Terrone, from Mercato San Severino in Campania, has made his surname (a pejoriative term for a Southern Italian) a point of honour and pride in his life long fight for the equal representation of the South of Italy.

  In receiving this, the highest of public honours, he has fulfilled his dream of showing that ‘terrone’ can aim to be used in more than just a derogatory sense. “A battle of civility,” he has called it, not forgetting his struggle to find work in Milan in the 1990s with a name that caused at best, much amusement for the Northerners, and at worst doors slammed in his face.

  His fight for recognition of ‘terrone’ as more than just a peasant, as well as for a better representation of the South in general, included this year suing the Accademia della Crusca in Florence, the prestigious linguistic institution, for their definition of ‘terrone’ as a ‘peasant’

  Terrone, 60, is the author of hundreds of poems, the President of MESPI (Economic-Social Popular Inter-European Movement) and founder of the Francesco Terrone Foundation, which promotes cultural and literary creativity, economic development and global interaction.

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