A campaign has been launched to have charges dropped against an Italian mayor who opened up his community to refugees and asylum seekers at the height of Europe’s migrant crisis.

Domenico Lucano was the mayor of Riace, a village of 2,000 residents in southern Italy, between 2004 and 2018. During that time he helped welcome 450 refugees and settle them in the tiny town.

And in the wake of decades of post-war depopulation in the town as young Italians moved away, the so-called Riace model became a model of multi-ethnic integration and renewed town life.

But Italy’s then government – dominated by the far-right Northern League – saw it as threat to its plans for harsher migrant policies.

Mr Lucano was placed under house arrest in 2018, all public funding was cut to his programs, and he was hit with an array of allegedly bogus charges.

Last September, he was convicted of fraud, embezzlement, and abetting ‘illegal’ immigration.

As well as a prison sentence that was nearly double what prosecutors had originally asked for, Mr Lucano faces fines of over half a million euros.

He has announced his plans to appeal, a process that is expected to take a year.

Recently, a coalition led by left-wing activist organisation Progressive International launched a campaign to demand that the former mayor be exonerated and that all charges against him be dropped.

Mr Lucano said his lawyers were preparing an appeal against the ministry, which has demanded a breakdown of all expenses.

“How is it possible to think of destroying the ‘Riace model’, which has been described by innumerable people, politicians, intellectuals and artists, as an extraordinary experience?” Mr Lucano told media.

“They want to destroy us and I am immensely bitter,” he said.

His migrant program saw abandoned houses restored and craft workshops reopened in the town, attracting tourists, and was lauded by many as a model of integration.

At the time, Mr Lucano, known as ‘Mimmo’, made headlines around the world for welcoming migrants to the sparsely-populated town in Calabria in a bid to boost jobs and development.

Mr Lucano was even named one of the 100 most influential personalities by Fortune magazine in 2016, and inspired a documentary by Wim Wenders.

A schoolteacher before entering politics, he was first inspired to make Riace a home for displaced people when he spoke to Kurdish refugees arriving in Italy in the late 1990s.

Progressive International says the Italian government under current Prime Minister Mario Draghi has rolled back some of former interior minister Matteo Salvini’s most extreme anti-immigrant regulations but has hardly turned the country into a welcoming haven.

After Mr Lucano’s conviction, Italian political theorist Donatella Di Cesare said the verdict was “an explicit message against anyone who dares to imitate his example in the future. The message is that those who welcome migrants are criminals”.