The History Behind Bella Ciao (and Why It Became a Global Protest Anthem) (2024)

The Italian folk song Bella Ciao is perhaps the most iconic Italian song in the world. From Ukraine to Iran, protesters worldwide have chanted the stirring tune to demonstrate against injustice and oppression.

Originally a symbol of the Italian resistance movement against the Fascist regime and the Nazi invaders, over the years Bella Ciao became a global anthem of freedom, solidarity, and justice.

A Punjabi version of the tune was sung by Indian farmworkers to protest new agri laws. In 2022, during the demonstrations following the death of 22-years-old Mahsa Amini, a video of an Iranian singer performing the song in Persian went viral.

Before that, Bella Ciao gained global traction in 2019, when it became the musical leitmotiv of Netflix’s hit show La Casa de Papel (Money Heist).

“Alla mattina appena alzata.” The Origin of Bella Ciao.

Today, Bella Ciao is universally known as the partisan song par excellence. However, it wasn’t born during the Italian Resistance. Though it is still unclear who invented the anthem, it is generally believed that Bella Ciao dates back to the 19th century when seasonal rice paddy women workers sang it to protest and lament their inhuman working conditions.

These rice weeders, known as mondine (from the Italian mondare, “to clean” or “to peel”), spent their days with their feet and legs in the water and worked for long hours with their backs bent in the rice fields of the Po Valley in northern Italy. According to many scholars, the mondine, young women from the lowest social classes, invented this song to denounce their working conditions and meager wages. They also aimed to stir themselves and other workers to action against the landlords who exploited them. This original version of the song was called Alla mattina appena alzata, “In the morning I got up.” Its lyrics described the “insects and mosquitoes” that tormented the mondine, their “curved backs,” and the boss’s “cane.” Most of all, the mondine lamented that they were “losing [their] youth every hour that [they] passed” in the rice fields. The song, however, ended on a hopeful note: “But the day will come,” sang the mondine, “when us all will work in freedom.”

Alla mattina appena alzata gained national fame in the 1960s when Italian folksinger Giovanna Daffini sang it in several country festivals and recorded it. Accompanied by her husband, Vittorio Carpi, on the violin, the singer, who worked as a mondina in her youth, contributed to the rediscovery of old protest and folk songs. Her powerful voice and heartfelt interpretation moved the audience and gave new life to these tunes.

In recent years, many scholars questioned whether Bella Ciao was adapted from the song invented by the mondine in the 19th century. Some historians go as far as to claim that Alla mattina appena alzata was never sung by the rice weeders of the Po Valley. They assert that the song was written in the 1950s specifically for Giovanna Daffini. In 2006, a new intriguing theory emerged. That year, Fausto Giovannardi, an engineer from Italy, discovered a close similarity between Bella Ciao and a Klezmer-Yiddish song called Koilen played by Misha Ziganoff. The tune was recorded in 1919 in New York. It remains unclear how and when it arrived in Italy. However, some historians discard the thesis that Bella Ciao dates back to the Yiddish song claiming that there is limited historical evidence to support it.

“O partigiano portami via.” Bella Ciao and the Italian Resistance.

On September 8, 1943, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, Italy’s new Prime Minister, announced that Italy had signed an unconditional armistice with the Allies. In July of the same year, Benito Mussolini, the Fascist dictator, was overthrown by members of his own Grand Council and arrested. Shortly after the 1943 armistice, German troops invaded and occupied northern and central Italy. As a result, many young men (and women) fled into the mountains where they organized an armed resistance movement against the Nazis invaders and the Republic of Salò, a fascist state founded by Mussolini on Lake Garda. The conflict ended in the spring of 1945 when the partigiani called for a general uprising and liberated many Italian cities. Since 1949, the Italians have celebrated the end of the German occupation and the Fascist regime on April 25. Known as Giorno della liberazione, “Liberation Day,” April 25th is one of the major national holidays in Italy.

Today, Bella Ciao is a staple of the annual April 25th celebrations. The song gained popularity in Italy after the end of World War II. It eventually became the most emblematic tune of the Italian Resistance. It is not difficult to understand why postwar Italy adopted Bella Ciao as a partisan anthem. After the war, the Resistenza became the founding myth of the newly established democratic and republican State. Indeed, in 1945, the Italian Republic was founded on the the struggle of the Resistance and its political ideals. The lyrics of Bella Ciao, infused with hope and defiance, perfectly describe the experience of the partisans and their beliefs. The song tells the story of a young man who says the last farewell to his girlfriend before joining the partisans. Though the young fighter “feel death approaching,” he takes comfort in knowing that he will not die in vain: “If I die as a partisan,” he tells his girlfriend, “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’.”

Though Bella Ciao is now a universal symbol of resistance, many scholars believe that it wasn’t the most popular tune during the resistance movement. They claim that the partisans chanted other songs to boost their morale, gain courage, and persevere with their fight for freedom. Oral historian Cesare Bermani, for example, writes that Bella Ciao was sung only by the members of the Maiella Brigade in Abruzzo, a region in central Italy. Others argue that it was invented by partisan groups operating near the city of Bologna. To this day, the identity of the author of the lyrics remains unknown.

Bella Ciao becomes an International Anthem.

“Bella Ciao,” writes Cesare Bermani in Bella Ciao. Storia e fortuna di una canzone (Bella Ciao. History and Fortune of a Song), “is the most famous Italian song in the world. It is even more famous than Volare and O’ Sole mio. It is chanted in all protest movements and partisan struggles. It unites the world.” Indeed, since the 1960s, Bella Ciao has continually reinserted itself into new and diverse contexts. The partisan song has become a collective desire for freedom and a universal call for resistance to oppression. It was chanted, for example, during the 2008 Occupy Wall Street manifestations. In 2015, it was sung at the funerals of the victims of the terrorist attack at the offices of the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo. More recently, Bella Ciao has been adopted by the Fridays For Future movement to demand action against global warming. In the spring of 2020, during Italy’s first lockdown, many Italians sang Bella Ciao from their windows, balconies, and rooftops to lift spirits.

In 2017, Bella Ciao enjoyed renewed popularity due to Netflix’s hit series Money Heist. In the show, the Professor identifies himself and his band of robbers as the “Resistance.” “Throughout the show,” comments Pauline Bock in the New Statesman, “the song carries their hopes of resistance — it’s not about the money as much as it is about what money represents. [The robbers] don’t think themselves as bad guys, but as revolutionaries against an unjust system.” The scene where the Professor and his brother, Berlin, sing Bella Ciao to boost their morale the night before the heist has become one of the most iconic moments of the show. On Youtube, the clip has more than a hundred million views.

Scholars still struggle to understand when Bella Ciao stopped being an Italian folk song and became a global hymn for protest and freedom. According to some historians, the French-Italian actor Yves Montand, born Ivo Livi, first brought the partisan song outside Italy in 1964. Others believe that much of Bella Ciao’s international popularity is due to the Festival dei Due Mondi, “Festival of the Two Worlds,” held in Spoleto in the same year. That year, the festival featured a show called “Bella Ciao” during which Italian singers performed famous folk and protest songs. The show stirred up a heated controversy and brought Bella Ciao into the (inter)national public eyes. Since then, countless artists have performed and recorded their rendition of the song in the original Italian and other languages.

Why has Bella Ciao inspired so many activists and artists who often don’t know the song’s history and its original meaning? “Every text,” famously claims Roland Barthes in his The Death of the Author, “is written eternally here and now. […] A text consists of multiple writings, proceeding from several cultures and entering into dialogue, into parody, into contestation.” Similarly, French philosopher Jacques Derrida declared that all written texts are by their very nature open to new interpretations and understandings. Every time activists and protestors sang Bella Ciao, they infused its lyrics with new meanings. “The reader,” explains Barthes, “is the very space in which are inscribed, without any of them being lost, all the citations out of which a writing is made; the unity of a text is not in its origins but in its destination.” Thus, Bella Ciao has come to represent a collective hope for freedom and rebirth. Above all, Bella Ciao is “a song of struggle,” states Alex Pina, the creator of Money Heist, “which evokes a dream of freedom.”