The trashing of a song – however illustrious its history – is a minor issue compared with the social divisions that a future government led by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and Matteo Salvini’s League would foment. But the radical right’s targeting of the Italian liberation anthem Bella Ciao during the current election campaign is nevertheless instructive.
Over the years, this ballad of a young partisan who says goodbye to his lover and heads for the mountains to fight Hitler and Mussolini has become an international hymn to liberty. Yves Montand, whose family fled fascist Italy for France, enhanced its fame by recording it in 1964. The folk singer Mercedes Sosa, having escaped the clutches of Argentina’s military junta, gave a famous rendition in Milan in 1983. More recently, in the Middle East, Kurdish fighters adopted it as they fought Isis.
