Terrone


Terrone is an Italian term for people who dwell in Southern Italy.
The term comes from an agent noun formed from the word terra. In fact it was historically used, after the Italian unification, to describe the landlords of the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, highlighting the fact that they profited from a type of land property, the latifundium, by which they used to own the land without ever working it; the word also stands for "person from a land prone to earthquakes".
Until the 1950s, terrone kept the classist meaning of "peasant", "person working the land"; at one point, even people migrating from the relatively more rural regions of Veneto, Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany to the industrialised Lombardy had been accordingly nicknamed terroni del nord. However, it was not until the Italian economic miracle, when a great number of Southerners migrated to the industrial centers of Northern Italy, that it began to be strictly used to indicate people from Southern Italy. From terrone later derived Terronia "the land of the Terroni", and the adjective terronico "anything related to the Terroni".
The epithet often implies the occurrence of negative stereotypes for the person labelled in such wise, such as laziness, ignorance and lack of hygiene. Similarly, with particular reference to some slang, the term has taken on the meaning of an uncouth person lacking in good manners, like the other Italian words villano, burino and cafone.
In Italy, the term has strongly racist undertones of rejection and has been recognized as an insult by the Italian Court of Cassation, because it is also generally associated with certain somatic, phenotypical and physical traits more common to the Mediterranean part of Italy than to the North, such as olive skin, short stature, high cheekbones and other characteristics.