“Bella Ciao”, origins and versions of a “Resistant” song

The last, great case concerning ‘Bella Ciao’ dates back to just under a decade ago, in one of the most successful TV series of recent years, ‘The Carta di Carta’ in Netflix. The central character is the professor, who commands the gang in charge of burning the Spanish central bank: remember to have learned “Bella Ciao” by his grandfather, a partisan who had fought against the fascists in Italy. The song is told how the symbol of the resistance, both the partisan one and that of the band that steals the rich, at the center of history. In the series he will return to several versions and several times, including in the scene in which the bunker is burgled: thanks to the success of the series, he acquired a new international resonance. “Bella Ciao” is, in fact, one of the best known Italian songs abroad, but also one of the most misunderstood. Is the song of April 25, the resistance party? Is it a political song?

Beautiful hello and the resistance

At a certain point it was even the great Giorgio Bocca, a formidable journalist and former partisan, who intervened in the debate on ‘Bella Ciao’, on which two disputes had been crossed for a long time. The one on which mouth spoke concerned the truthfulness of the essence of the song as a partisan song: “In the twenty months of the partisan war I never heard sing ‘Bella Ciao’, it was an invention of the Spoleto Festival”. In a recent documentary, a Piedmontese partisan, on the other hand, remembers having heard her sing in Alba, but certainly without having ever had the perception that it was a symbolic song, as it was instead “whistling the wind”.

The song-symbol of liberation and resistance, the soundtrack of the festival of April 25, would therefore be a popular song and of struggle but, according to the mouth not only but to the vast literature on the topic, appears more likely that it began to sing it after the Second World War, always in partisan environments.
The reference of mouth is in fact to the show staged for the first time in 1964 at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, as well as to the album published by the new Italian songbook for the discs of the sun, which transformed the song into a symbol of partisan memory and the anti -fascist struggle, thus associating it with what happened a twenty years before, as detailed in detail the recent book by Jacopo Tomatis

The origins of the song

The other controversy concerns the alleged origin of ‘Bella Ciao’, reconstructed both by Tomatis and by the historian Cesare Bermani, who denied its origins as singing of the Mondine, attributed to Vasco Scansani, while the ‘beautiful hello’ partisan was something else and had another origin. Tomatis also underlines that there is no evidence of connections between the ‘beautiful hello of the marshad’, which deals with the hard life in the rice fields and the fight against exploitation, and the partisan version.

The other origin of the song could derive from popular songs linked to the Klezmer tradition and popular Yiddish music of Eastern Europe. In the album that documents the show staged at the 1964 Spoleto Festival by the new Italian songbook you can listen to the two versions of ‘Bella Ciao’: that ‘of the Marshals’ and the ‘partisan’ one.

Controversy

The song is periodically at the center of controversy, the most recent is that of 2022, with Laura Pausini who refused to sing it calling it “politics”: the song has in fact become a symbol to be fought for the right and a sort of hymn for the left – in both cases undressed and covered with a different meaning. To read the text there is nothing that you refer to something political. Nonetheless, even on that occasion there was a furious debate, with the singer attacked by Pierpaolo Capovilla and defended by Simone Cristicchi. More recently, in Sanremo in 2024, I try to drop in a trael Amadeus and Marco Mengoni: an correspondent of Le Iene asked to give it, the singer spent on the game avoiding the political dimension.

The different versions

In remembering some of the most famous versions, we start from that of Milva, which recorded two versions in 1965 (‘Partisan’ and ‘Mondina’) and which found himself famous for one of his interpretations when last year his version was included in the Iranian film “There is no Evil”, winner of the gold bear at the Berlin Film Festival (even in Iran the song is a hymn of protest for years).

The international notoriety of the song, however, is traced back to Ivo Livi, better known as Yves Montand, a French actor in fact but Tuscan by birth, who would have performed it in public for the first time outside Italy in 1964. In 2012, his illustrious fellow citizen – Francois Hollande – used an adaptation during his presidential campaign and, always to stay in political territory, also resorted to Turkey in the manifestation of the square in 2013 Erdogan government.
Those who make a firm point in his concerts is the Bosnian Goran Bregovic

His other regular executor is also Manu Chao:

But, if the version that you would not have expected to listen could be that of Tom Waits and Marc Ribot, who inserted “Bella Ciao” in “Songs of Resistance 1942-2018”, guitarist album

The international popularity of the song owes a lot to Netflix, its version of Manu Pilas in “The Carta di Carta”, which he has

Among the most recent versions, that of Francesco Guccini: