“Bella ciao” (Goodbye beautiful) is an Italian protest folk song from the late 19th century. The origins of the song are unclear, although one hypothesis is that “Bella Ciao” was originally sung as “Alla mattina appena alzata” (“In the morning as soon as I woke up”) by seasonal workers of paddy fields of rice, especially in Italy’s Po Valley from the late 19th century to the first half of the 20th century, with different lyrics. They worked at mondare (weeding) the rice fields in northern Italy, to help the healthy growth of young rice plants. This work was performed during the flooding of the fields, from the end of April to the beginning of June every year. During this time, the first stages of their development, the delicate shoots needed to be protected from the difference in temperature between the day and the night. It consisted of two phases: transplanting the plants and pruning the weeds.
Mondare was an extremely tiring task, carried out primarily by women known as mondine (plural; singular mondina), from the poorest social classes. They would spend their workdays with bare feet in water up to their knees, and their backs bent continuously. The atrocious working conditions, long hours and very low pay led to constant dissatisfaction and, at times, to rebellious movements and riots in the early years of the 20th century. The struggles against the supervising padroni were even harder, with plenty of clandestine workers ready to compromise even further the already low wages just to get work. Other versions of the antecedents of “Bella ciao” appeared over the years, indicating that “Alla mattina appena alzata” must have been composed in the latter half of the 19th century. The earliest written version is dated back to 1906 and comes from near Vercelli, Piedmont.
There are no indications of the relevance of “Bella ciao” among the partisan brigades, nor of the very existence of the ‘partisan version’ prior to the first publication of the text in 1953. There are no traces in the documents of the immediate postwar period nor its presence in important songbooks. The 1963 version of Yves Montand shot to fame after the group II Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano presented it at the 1964 Festival dei Due Mondi at Spoleto both as a song of the mondine and as a partisan hymn, and the latter so “inclusive” that it could hold together the various political souls of the national liberation struggle (Catholics, Communists, Socialists, Liberals…) and even be sung at the end of the Christian Democracy (Democrazia Cristiana) 1975 congress which elected the former partisan Zaccagnini as national secretary”.
Even the historians of the Italian song have affirmed that “Bella ciao” was not sung or was rarely sung during the partisan war, but was widespread immediately after the Second World War. Only a few voices, such as that of the historians Bermani and Giacomini, claim that some version of “Bella ciao” was sung by some brigades during the Resistance, although not necessarily in the now popular ‘partisan version’, of whose existence, as specified above, there is no documentary evidence until the 1950s. The text as sung today was first published in 1953 in the magazine La Lapa, and then in L’Unita in 1957.
In 2017 and 2018, the song received renewed popularity due to the singing of “Bella ciao” multiple times in the Spanish television series Money Heist. The character Tokyo recounts in one of her narrations, “The life of the Professor revolved around a single idea: Resistance. His grandfather, who had fought against the fascists in Italy, taught him the song and he taught us.” The song is played in emblematic moments in the series as a metaphor for freedom. In March 2020, the song once again gained international attention after Europeans and Italians in lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe sang “Bella ciao” from the balconies of their housing complexes. In 2023, unionists from the Italian General Confederation of Labour, Italian Confederation of trade Unions, and Italian Labour Union sang “Bella Ciao” to protest Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has been criticized for her party’s neo-fascist origins.
