The lyrics are so simple that it fits into a single sentence: a guerrilla finds the invader one morning, senses that he is going to die and asks his girl to bury him in the mountain, under the shadow of a flower, so that people can see it and say: "How beautiful! It is the flower of the partisan who died for freedom." That's it. Nothing else. Well: that, and the word bella, which is repeated 18 times, and the word ciao, repeated 30 times.
So why all the furor over Bella ciao? Why do they sing it in Gaza with the lute and in the trenches of Ukraine? Why does Laura Pausini refuse to sing it to avoid problems? Why do Iranian women sing it as a challenge to the oppressor by removing their hijab? Why did several MEPs sing it in the Strasbourg Parliament after a xenophobic speech by Viktor Orbán? Why did the 15M squares and also the Catalan independentists sing it? Why did it triumph on the balconies of the pandemic and why does it resonate at demonstrations, rallies and funerals? Why does Becky G sing it to a Latin rhythm between gold bars and neon lights? Why did the Lazio ultras threaten the Albanian full-back Elseid Hysaj for having sung it during his welcome dinner to the club? Because?
The Italian historian Marcello Flores has launched into the history of this song in his essay Bella Ciao. History of a popular hymn (Altamarea), which this month arrives in Spanish bookstores. Their journey begins, among the fog that generates the great legends, in the rice fields of northern Italy where the mondine, the day laborers, sang in the 19th century a work melody that may have inspired Bella ciao. It even goes back to research that reaches French and Spanish songs from the 16th century and two songs from the Yiddish tradition that could be its musical antecedent. But soon the book lands on the war fields of World War II. There begins the great battle of Bella ciao.
Today there is a belief that Bella Ciao was the great anthem of those Italian partisans with rifles on their shoulders and clenched fists. But it's false. There were other songs that were much more popular. More explicit. More red. Fischia il vento was the big hit. In it, the wind blows, the storm rages, the shoes are broken and yet the partisans continue walking. It talks about fascist traitors, red flags and conquering the red spring. That combat song was written by Felice Cascione, a young twenty-five-year-old doctor who served as a partisan commander in the Imperia area. He composed it one night, around the fire, while waiting with his group of comrades. His mother, a teacher, corrected some phrases in the lyrics before young Cascione was wounded while trying to recover medical equipment after a war and was later executed, in cold blood, by a camicia nera.
A murdered doctor. Another partisan fallen for freedom. Fischia il vento remained as a flower of his memory. However, in the sixties, Bella ciao displaced that song and became the great song of the Resistance. That's what Marcello Flores says in his book. That there were two moments. In 1962, Bella ciao was collected in the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano as one of the main partisan songs. The following year, Bella ciao entered the repertoire of light and commercial music with the help of the great melodic singer Yves Montand, a former French Resistance fighter, who had actually been born in the Italian province of Pistoia into a family of anti-fascist parents who had emigrated to Marseille when the child was two years old.
Montand was followed by Claudio Villa, Anna Identici, Gigliola Cinquetti. Bella ciao was already playing on the radio and was hummed by a new generation. But he was also politically useful in the streets. Because it unified democratic Italy. "By having the German invader as its only reference, it could be received as a song of unity, well received not only by Christian Democrats and Socialists, but also by the army and partisan associations. These were the years of the posthumous construction of the memory of the Resistance," explains Marcello Flores.
That has changed in recent times. “If today in Italy Bella ciao seems indigestible to someone and is associated with a post-communist imaginary, it is because media distortion has given it a color that it did not have before,” writes Flores, specialized in the study of totalitarianisms, genocides and human rights in the 20th century.
Bella ciao is no longer a song for everyone in Italy, but it is more universal than ever after it was catapulted on Netflix by the successful series Money Heist: the scriptwriters were stuck on a scene and one of them—Javier Gómez Santander—started, as so often, to listen to Bella ciao because it is a song that cheers him up. Then he thought: "This is the song. We have to start with Bella ciao." The rest is history. As researcher Irene Matas has analyzed in an academic article titled “Bella ciao, from anti-fascist symbol to pop icon”, the overwhelming success of the series has meant that the song has “impregnated all social strata regardless of their ideology.”
Marcello Flores, 80 years old, sang it for the first time in public to protest against the execution of the communist Julián Grimau at the hands of the Franco dictatorship in April 1963. It has rained a lot. Or maybe not so much. In conversation with EL PAÍS, Flores says that "the world has always been polarized between the defenders of freedom, those who choose to fight for it, and those who fight against it, even if they pay lip service to it. Precisely the current opposition to Bella ciao in Italy may be a symptom of that position on the part of a neo-fascist right. But I believe, and I hope, that in the coming years the path of freedom will once again be considered the most appropriate and useful for everyone. Meanwhile, let us not forget the tragic memories that overshadow our present and let us find in them those beautiful flowers that deserve to be told.”
