Every year on April 25, Italians gather around heavily laden tables and barbecues and chant “Bella Ciao” at least half a dozen times, right hand on the heart. It was sung as an anti-fascist resistance song during the second world war and singing it has become part of the annual ritual celebrating Liberation Day, the anniversary of the end of the fascist regime and Nazi occupation in 1945.
In March and April 2020, under Italy’s first strict lockdown, “Bella Ciao” could be heard constantly, coming from the roofs, windows and balconiesoverlooking empty streets in Rome, Milan and Bologna, like a reassuring, collective mantra.
But “Bella Ciao” wasn’t born as a partisan anthem. Its first authors were the 19th-century mondine (literally “weeders”), female rice paddy field workers of the Po Valley, in the country’s north east, who sang dirges lamenting their harsh working conditions. The original lyrics describe “insects and mosquitoes”, the boss’s “cane”, the “curved” backs of the mondine, the “torment” of wasting their youth toiling. Its repetitive quadruple meter seems designed to mark the long working hours and make time go faster. As in the wartime adaptation, the words “bella ciao”(“goodbye beautiful”) were sung thrice in the second line of each verse, but the identity of the bellathe mondineare waving goodbye to remains unclear. It could be their beautiful youth, their freedom, or even themselves.
In the 1940s, an unknown author adapted the mondine’s song of protest for the Italian resistance movement, telling the story of a young man who leaves his girlfriend to join the partisan militia, and, probably for the last time, says goodbye. This version offers a much darker narrative: “Take me,” the narrator asks the partisan, “because I feel death approaching.”
“If I die as a partisan,” he continues, “you must bury me / up in the mountain / under the shade of a beautiful flower / and all those who will pass by / will say ‘What a beautiful flower / This is the flower of the partisan / who died for freedom’”.
The repetition of “bella ciao”in this last-farewell story seems to convey the impending danger of the invader approaching, as much as the narrator’s inability to say goodbyefor the last time.
Today, “Bella Ciao” is still a prominent feature on Italy’s political landscape. Most recently adopted by the Sardines protest movement during anti-Salvini protests of 2019, the song became a contentious subject when a League party politician was reprimanded for posting on social media a cartoon in which gunmen take aim at people singing “Bella Ciao” on Liberation Day.
But it was French-Italian actor Yves Montand,born Ivo Livi, who first brought “Bella Ciao” to a global audience. The Tuscan-born artist —whose family escaped to southern France during fascism —reportedly performed it for the first time outside Italy in 1964, starting its journey from partisan folklore to international anti-fascist triumph.
Outside Italy, it was sung during the 2013 Gezi Park protests against the Erdogan government in Istanbul. François Hollande used an adaptation of it during his 2012 French presidential campaign and, in the same year, it was turned into an environmental activist song (“Do it now”) demanding action against global warming. In South America, the anti-Bolsonaro #EleNão activists of Brazil and Colombians protesting against their government made their own versions of it and sang them marching.
Its artistic adaptations reach even further. The Argentine folk singer Mercedes Sosa, who had opposed and fled the Peronist dictatorship, sang “Bella Ciao” as an exile in Europe, stunning a Milanese audience in 1983. Manu Chao, whose family fled the Franco dictatorship in Spain, often performs his Latin American take on the partisan song, and for Bosnian singer-songwriter Goran Bregovic,“Bella Ciao” is a regular feature of his concerts.
It was catapulted into the global commercial scene when it featured as the soundtrack of blockbuster Netflix series Money Heistin 2018, with an adaptation by Manu Pilas.In the same year, Marc Ribotincluded a live performance of “Bella Ciao” with Tom Waits on his political album, Songs of Resistance 1942-2018.
How has “Bella Ciao” travelled so far, touching artists, activists and politicians who often wouldn’t be able to grasp the song’s literal meaning? Money Heistcreator Alex Pina’s explanation is that it’s simply “a song of struggle, which evokes a dream of freedom”.
What are your memories of ‘Bella Ciao’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Wrasse Records; Atresmúsica; Anti/Epitaph; Vintage Jukebox
Picture credit: Max Cavallari/Getty Images
