“This is not Eurovision,” said the speaker of the European parliament, Roberta Metsola, as she tried to silence leftwing MEPs greeting the visiting Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, with a rowdy rendition of the classic anti-fascist anthem Bella Ciao.
The bang-your-fists-on-the-table motif at the heart of this earworm of a ditty – whose title means “Goodbye, beautiful” – may indeed sound like something cooed through dry fog by a spandex-clad blond at the European song contest. But the story it tells reaches far deeper into the continent’s history than the annual kitsch music extravaganza, telling an age-old tale of the left’s determined struggle against political oppression.
Or that, at least, is how it is usually perceived.
The song’s most commonly known version is narrated from the point of view of a partisan fighter, who wakes one morning knowing he has to leave his loved one behind to fight an unspecified invader, realising he may never see her again.
“If I die as a partisan,” he sings, “You must bury me / bury me up there, on the mountain / under the shadow 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.’”
Bella Ciao is not only belted out across Italy every year on 25 April to celebrate the end of Benito Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship and the German Nazi occupation. But in recent years, it has also been proclaimed at anti-government protests in Iran, chanted on the barricades of Ukraine, sung by women’s rights protesters in Poland, and illicitly broadcast from mosque minarets in Turkey.
From Chile to Hong Kong, from Occupy Wall Street to Fridays for Future, it has become the ultimate musical expression of a yearning for freedom.
The song’s prominent use in the Spanish series La Casa de Papel (Money Heist), one of the most-streamed shows in Netflix’s history, means it has reached less politically active minds and – via electronic remixes – the dance floors of night clubs.
Yet the origins of Bella Ciao are as tangled as its musical appeal is straightforward. The oldest known recording of a melody resembling the song dates back to 1919, by the Odesa-born klezmer accordionist Mishka Ziganoff, with various researchers tracing its roots in French, Yiddish or Dalmatian folk music. Ziganoff’s version, however, came without the lyrics.
A lyrical version places the song not amid the resistenza – the Italian resistance movement fighting Nazi occupiers and their Italian collaborators from 1943-45 – but the paddy fields of Italy’s north-eastern Po Valley. Its narrator is not a male partisan but a mondina, a female “rice weeder” complaining about mosquitoes and cruel bosses.
This would suggest that Bella Ciao is a 19th-century folk song that was politicised during the second world war, but in recent years musical scholars have suggested that the “partisan” version precedes the “mondina” version.
Casting yet more doubt over its origin, some historians say the “partisan” version may have been invented after the resistance struggle had come to an end, as there is scant evidence of it ever having been sung by any actual partisans.
Even if Bella Ciao was sung by some partisans from Abruzzo, as the Italian historian Cesare Bermani has argued, it probably wasn’t central to the resistance movement. Most partisans would have been more likely to chant the more overtly leftist Garibaldi brigades’ hymn, Fischia il Vento, which was based on a Russian melody and prophesied a “red spring”.
In the cold war era, Bella Ciao, with its vaguely defined enemy and stress on romance over ideology, became a more consensual anthem by which to remember the fight against fascism.
At Wednesday’s plenary session in Strasbourg, the song was mostly belted out from the top left corner of the hemicycle chamber where the leftwing parties sit. Which seems a shame: the original appeal of Bella Ciao was precisely that it allowed parties of varying stripes to lock arms against anti-democrats.
