Bella Ciao: The Two Lives of an Italian Farewell

Bella Ciao means “Goodbye, beautiful.” Most people know it as an anti-fascist anthem: sung at demonstrations, football terraces, protests, remixes, and in Money Heist. But its history is not as tidy as the familiar story suggests.

The usual version says that a song of women working in the rice fields became a song of partisans fighting fascism, then travelled around the world. The truth is messier. The famous rice-field lyrics may be younger than the partisan song, and the partisan version became the great anthem of the Italian Resistance mainly after the war was over.

This episode follows the two lives of Bella Ciao: the world of the mondine, seasonal women workers in northern Italy’s flooded rice fields, and the world of the partisans after Italy’s 1943 armistice, when German forces occupied much of the country. Along the way, the song passes through klezmer echoes, older Italian ballads, Giovanna Daffini, Yves Montand, Spoleto, Chilean revolutionaries, Chumbawamba, Money Heist, and Tom Waits.