Liberation Day: The Politics of "Bella Ciao"

RST attended three April 25, 2015 Liberation Day ceremonies.  At 2 of them, and possibly 3 (we left before the end of the 3rd one, televised by RAI 1), the "Bella Ciao" anthem was sung.  To further understanding of the importance of the song and its place in Italian culture, we are republishing a revealing 2010 piece by writer and translator Frederika Randall.  Following her commentary, Randall presents the song's lyrics in Italian and English.

Frederika Randall returns as guest blogger with this post, that begins with a curious but telling incident at a Rome public school. Randall has written about Italian society, the arts, literature, film and culture for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and now reports on politics for the Nation and the Italian weekly Internazionale. She lives in Rome.


The G.G. Belli is a middle school in Prati, named, as state schools in Italy are, for famous men--in this case, the great 19th C Romanesco sonneteer Giuseppe Gioachino Belli. (Just about the only schools honoring famous women are those named after female saints and martyrs.) On an ordinary day, not much happens at the G.G. Belli beyond the usual stuff that happens in a school full of budding teenagers. But May 27 was no ordinary day.

The school orchestra had been invited to the Education Ministry in Trastevere, to give a special concert for several illustrious members of the Berlusconi adminstration including the Undersecretary for Education, a certain Giuseppe Pizza (I had to look him up, a former Christian Democrat politician, I learned from the Corriere della Sera, who never merited a single dispatch by the national wire service ANSA in his first forty years of service.)

And so the kids performed their program and after they had finished, they played, by way of an encore, a few bars of Bella Ciao, a rousing partisan song dear to the Italian Resistance, and a piece of music known around the world.

Bad choice.

Minutes later, the Belli’s principal was fit to be tied. She immediately dashed off a letter to the teaching staff, students and parents calling the encore rendition “a deplorable act” and suggesting it had been prompted by some unnamed adults.

So what was wrong with playing Bella Ciao?
Only a few years ago the anti-Fascist Resistance was practically sacred in Italy, for it was the resistance movement that had battled the Nazi invaders and the Fascist dictatorship and gave birth to the Italian Republic in 1946, and the constitution in 1948. But for some on the right, Berlusconi among them, the Resistance smacks of disobedience, of insurrection, of the Communist brigades among the partisans who fought Mussolini and who some once feared would inherit power after the war. Berlusconi--who regularly campaigns on an anti-Communist platform despite the fact that the Italian Communist Party was dissolved in 1991, before he entered politics—not only governs with the support of the former neo-Fascists, he has often had kind words for Mussolini, who he seems to think has an underserved bad rep. A lot of people on the right don’t like Bella Ciao. In parts of Northern Italy, where the extreme rightists-separatists of the Northern League govern, the song was banned this year on April 25, Liberation Day.

We can only guess that the Belli school principal had all these facts in mind when she chastised the kids for playing Bella Ciao. The performance had “cast a lingering shadow of discredit, placing the entire school in difficulty,” she warned. “We must never forget our duties toward our hosts,” she added, urging the parents to send letters of apology to the ministry. God knows these are grim days for school budgets, but her reaction seemed, well, a little excessive.

The parents thought so, too.
After a flurry of organizing on Facebook, a little group of kids and parents (see above left) turned out one morning to sing Bella Ciao in front of the school as the students were going in. For a video of the event, see http://tv.repubblica.it/copertina/bella-ciao-al-belli:-un-coro-contro-la-censura/48424?video
******

Prequel: In the summer of 2008 my husband and I were traveling through Montpelier, Vermont when we heard a busker playing Bella Ciao on the street. “It’s a beautiful old Italian partisan song,” the musician told Vittorio, who’s not only Italian but old enough (just) to remember the Resistance. They sang it together, Vittorio in Italian and the busker in English.
Strange to say, there is some uncertainty about the origins of the song. Although there’s general agreement on the lyrics, they do vary slightly from rendition to rendition. Those below come from Wikipedia, which also offers several English translations. Mine, below, is an attempt to provide a singable text that follows the meter of the Italian. To that end—sorry about that--some of the Italian words have been preserved.

Most musicologists believe Bella Ciao was adapted from a work song of the mondine, the women who worked in the rice fields of northern Italy, standing knee-deep in cold water, picking out tiny weeds. But recently, an amateur musical historian noticed that the melody of Bella Ciao was astonishingly similar to a klezmer song called Koilen, recorded in 1919 in New York by a Gypsy klezmer performer from Odessa named Mishka Tsiganoff. It was theorized that perhaps the song had made its way to Italy via returning Italian immigrants in the 1930s. Although an Italian origin is more likely, it does seem odd that a work song (and a stirring resistance melody) would be so melancholy, so minor key, as this one.

And now, for the good news: for the first time in many years, the National Association of Italian Partisans not only didn’t shrink in size as its members aged and died, but actually grew by some 20,000 members, many of them young people from 18-30 years of age.
So maybe there is a future for the Resistance after all.

Bella Ciao [this version is devoted to the Iranian dissidents]



Una mattina mi son svegliato,
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
Una mattina mi son svegliato,
e ho trovato l'invasor.
O partigiano, portami via,
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
O partigiano, portami via,
ché mi sento di morir.
E se io muoio da partigiano,
(E se io muoio sulla montagna)
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
E se io muoio da partigiano,
(E se io muoio sulla montagna)
tu mi devi seppellir.
E seppellire lassù in montagna,
(E tu mi devi seppellire)
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
E seppellire lassù in montagna,
(E tu mi devi seppellire)
sotto l'ombra di un bel fior.
Tutte le genti che passeranno,
(E tutti quelli che passeranno)
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
Tutte le genti che passeranno,
(E tutti quelli che passeranno)
Mi diranno «Che bel fior!»
(E poi diranno «Che bel fior!»)
«È questo il fiore del partigiano»,
(E questo è il fiore del partigiano)
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
«È questo il fiore del partigiano,
(E questo è il fiore del partigiano)
morto per la libertà!»
(che e' morto per la liberta')

--Anonymous


And here, in English is that “beautiful old Italian partisan song”

Early one morning, as I was waking
Oh bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
Early one morning, as I was waking,
I found the foe was at my door.

O partigiano, please take me with you
Oh bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
O partigiano, please take me with you,
For something tells me I must die.

If I should die then, as a partigiano,
If I should die in the hills, in the hills up there,
If I should die then, die in the hills there,
Then you must dig for me a grave.

Up in the hills there, dig me a grave then,
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella cia, ciao, ciao,
Up in the hills there, lay me to rest there,
There in the shade of a flowering tree.

So all who pass by, so all who pass by,
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
So all who pass by, so all who pass by,
Will see a splendid flowering tree.

The flower of freedom, of the partigiano,
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
The flower of freedom, of the partigiano,
Who died so all may now be free.
It’s the flower of freedom, of the partigiano,
Who died so all may now be free.

--tr F. Randall

Tufello: A Rebel Community

Vigne Nuove--we started here - no "new vineyards" in sight. 

On a sunny day in mid-May, we got on the Honda Forza 300 and headed north to Vigne Nuove.  The name refers both to the quartiere/neighborhood of Vigne Nuove, and to one of Rome's largest public housing projects (above), this one from the 1970s. Our plan was to have a look at the housing project (which we did--we plan a full report in a future post), then walk south into Tufello, an older, more human-sized enclave just to Vigne Nuove's south. If you're not on a scooter or in a car, Tufello is accessible, at its southern end, by the relatively new Jonio stop (one beyond Conca d'Oro) on Metro's "B1" line (though some refer to waiting for a Metro B1 as "waiting for Godot"). Vigne Nuove means "new vineyards." We're not sure when it got its name, but the area obviously was at one point an agricultural area with vineyards, and ruins of a 1st-century AD villa have been found there. And "Jonio" is also spelled "Ionio" as in the Ionian Sea between Italy and Greece.

"Welcome to Tufello, a Free and Rebellious Quartiere" - note the "Welcome" is expressed in BOTH the masculine and
feminine plural (very PC), instead of using the masculine plural to refer to both males and females - the classic use.

Tufello's "charm" comes in part from its geographical confinement; it's essentially a triangle with one angle at the top, bounded on the south by Viale Jonio, on the west by via Giovanni Conti, and on the east by via delle Vigne Nuove. At its center is Piazza degli Euganei (see below).

Just north of that piazza, off via Monte Massico, we encountered several apartment buildings--probably dating to the late 1940s or 1950s. The courtyards were less than elegant--not unusual for "public" spaces in Rome.  A few of the apartments had air conditioning, but here, as elsewhere in the city, clothes are dried by hanging them in the sun.

A sparse, uninviting courtyard.  Dianne checks the map. Yes, a print map.

This interior space had nice pine trees, but was overgrown

On one of the buildings, an ode to "Fabio," now deceased, "nel paradiso degli eroi" ("in the paradise of heroes").

Tufello has a cultural center, the C.C.P., or Centro di Cultura Popolare, offering a Yoga experience.

At the end of several blocks of this older housing, a new, more modern building:

Some new investment in the area

The main piazza has a large, somewhat awkward, modernist market, surrounded by the standard array of shops, many of them closed in the early afternoon, when we visited.

Many of Rome's neighborhoods have a "favorite son"--always a young man rather than a woman, and usually a political figure from the Anni di Piombo (Years of Lead), a period in the 1970s and early 1980s characterized by deep political divisions and violence. The identity of the favorite son defines the political identity of the neighborhood.

Tufello's walls tell the story.  In posters and wall art, the quartiere remembers Valerio Verbano.  Verbano was born into an anti-fascist family in 1961, and became an active militant during his high school years in the Rome neighborhood of Nuovo Salario.  He was a Communist and a member of Autonomia Operaia ("Worker's Autonomy" - loosely translated - perhaps "Power to the Workers" might be better).  In April 1979, Verbano was arrested and charged with fabricating explosive devices--basically, Molotov cocktails--in an abandoned building in San Basilio.  He was convicted and served 6 months in prison.

These signs appear on a gymnasium building (palestra). 

"Valerio Verbano--Militant Communist, Assassinated by the Fascist Skunks
An Idea Never Dies"

On February 22, 1980--three days from his 19th birthday--Verbano was shot and killed by three armed and masked men who had come to his home at via Monte Bianco 114, tied up his parents,and waited for Valerio to come home from school. Though the case was investigated many times over the years, it has never been solved--which may explain Verbano's prominence on Tufello's walls 40 years later. The Monte Bianco address places Verbano's home just south of Viale Jonio.

While much of the area's wall art and postering deals with Verbano, a good portion is more broadly political, marking the neighborhood as anti-fascist, militant and, after almost 80 years, still linked to the anti-Fascist/anti-Nazi partisans (partigiani) of World War II.  This wall immediately below links Verbano and Carla to the partisans.

"ieri partigiani"--yesterday, partisans

Identifying the enemies: money and Nazis--and something else

"Antifa Tufello"--anti-Fascist Tufello
Again, red and black flags

Cuore is heart, ribelle is rebels or rebellious. Not sure what a good translation would be
other than a literal "Rebellious heart". 

And the poster below reveals that Valerio is more than an idea; every year, on the anniversary of his death, the community marches in his memory, and for what he presumably stood for and against: against the "racism of the state," against the "war on the poor," "connecting the resistance."  A significant level of distrust of government here. (Tufello was cited in one of Conor Fitzgerald's novels as a neighborhood "where the police have not disturbed the criminal status quo." 

"1980...The Revolt Goes On...2019"

Bill

I've written many posts on "heroes" celebrated on Rome's walls, from both the left and the right. Here are some of them:
https://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-story-of-zippo.html
https://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2012/09/piazza-vescovio-anni-di-piombo-and.html
https://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2011/12/gabbo-death-and-life-of-gabriele-sandri.html
https://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2012/10/sites-of-anti-fascism-trionfale.html
https://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-tale-of-two-suburbs-balduina.html
https://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2019/10/villa-certosa-hidden-rome-neighborhood.html

Women with Guns: Rome's New Feminism

Saudi Arabia has just labeled feminism, along with homosexuality and something else I can't recall, an "extremism."  Having survived the American 1970s as a male, I can see their point. I was forced to learn to cook!

But that was almost 50 years ago, and I wasn't prepared for the hostile, militant feminism I found on the walls of Rome in the Spring of 2019.  I should qualify the "walls of Rome" reference in the last sentence.  Most of the aggressive feminist images and slogans I found were not in "Rome," as if they were everywhere in Rome, but in certain areas of the city--especially Pigneto, but a few other places as well.

Here we go.

You may have seen this one; it's been on the RST Facebook site.  "Monogamy is the New Fascism." It's in English, so maybe it doesn't count.

This one's a stencil.  While the message seems aggressive, it's also sensible:  "Neither forced maternity nor imposed sterility."

The next one's more obviously aggressive, yet it's also vague about what it's advocating:  "We're multiplying the feminist rage."  Followed by the standard feminist symbol - in triplicate.

"Addio al patriarcato"--a reasonable translation would be "Goodbye Patriarchy."  Who could disagree with that?  The symbol here combines feminism with anarchy.  Anarcho-Feminism.

Below: "Complicit with the women who resist and kill the aggressors." That's strong.

Now we're into visuals.  Many of these fall into the "women with..." category.

As in, below, "Woman with a Drill" (and small wrench).  One could think of this as something like Rosie the Riveter, or....?    From Ostiense.

Below, a piece of wall art.  I tried to translate "Tommy gani [or cani?] sciorti" and could not.  This is "woman with dagger as hand":

Then there's "woman with dynamite" (upper poster):

And "women with guns."  Four of the figures in the poster below are women, and three of them have guns. The rally of the New Resistances was to take place in Casal Bertone--a community just north of Pigneto.

The following poster invokes the Partisans of the 1940s, and in that sense the woman with a gun is justified.  But it also says "oggi antifascisti" (today [we are] antifascists]), and it's not so clear that anti-fascism requires women (or anyone) carrying weapons:

This poster announces a "sciopero globale transfeminista"--"a global strike of transfeminists," I guess.  The woman is masked and ready for street combat.

Two more.  The first one, below, was found in Pigneto and starts with "Gender violence also involves (or concerns) you." "La Casa delle Donne Lucha y Siesta" ("Women's House - Fight and Nap") is a self-run women's organization fighting violence against women, located in the Tuscolano quartiere. Again, the image has a Rosie-the- Riveter quality, but it's more aggressive than welcoming.

And finally, from Ostiense. Here, less aggressive than anxious? (For more on the F word in Rome, see here.)

Bill
Author of "Patty's Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America."

"Liberation Day" 2019 :The Left turns out (there are not "nice people" on both sides) and parties.

"Liberation...April 25...Pigneto Neighborhood Party"

Bear with me; I'll get to the party after "due parole" ("2 words" - I'm being a bit ironic, because in Italian for us that usually means the speaker is about to launch into a long discourse).  Let me first set the stage a bit.

For non-Italians and others who many not recall, April 25 is Liberation Day in Rome, a date - in 1945 -  selected by the state to celebrate the liberation of Italy from the Germans.  Rome was liberated earlier, June 4, 1944, as the Allies moved up from the South, driving the Germans north.

"In the social fight, LIBERATION!" (One can see why Salvini might not have liked this.)

As Bill pithily and eloquently explained in a 2009 post, it's also a contested day, because the right-wing doesn't want to celebrate a day which communists, the Jewish community, and heirs of partisans see as theirs. Not much has changed in 10 years.

That contestation continued this year, when the Deputy PM and leader of the right-wing, anti-immigrant party the Lega, Matteo Salvini, declared he would not show up at any Liberation Day events, because, as he said, "On April 25 there will be parades, partisans, anti-partisans, fascists, communists, reds, blacks, and greens, blues, yellows, reds. We are in 2019, I am not interested in the fascist-communist derby...." (He chose instead to go to Corleone, a Mafia-infested town in Sicily to show (off) that his government was combating the Mafia.) 

Comparing the liberation of Italy from the Nazis to a soccer game -  a "derby" is a soccer tournament that pits the two biggest rivals against each other - is trivializing it, to say the least. Very clear echoes of "there are fine people on both sides."  (For a discussion of the right-wing brazenness and the dangers of indifference, see Roger Cohen's op ed in the NYT.)

A very short 2 blocks from our door we found, instead of the usual sleepy
enoteca (think 'wine bar') with 1 or 2 customers, this crowd, live music,
lots of emptied wine and beer bottles.

This year the turnout on the left seemed especially high, and, the Jews and the partisan organization (ANPI - Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d'Italia) marched together.  They had not in the recent past because (as I recall) of ANPI's support for Palestine.
(For more on Liberation Day, see Frederika Randall's excellent post on the partisan anthem, "Bella Ciao.")

 Almost all our friends in Rome participated in the day in some way.  One took his granddaughter to lay flowers at the Fosse Ardeatine, the caves where more than 300 Italian men were summarily executed by the Nazis in retaliation for a partisan bombing that killed 33 German soldiers in March 1944. (Here is a post on the Fosse Ardeatine, which is also in an itinerary in our book.)

"The future is now; it's time to act" (and something about "big projects
for the environment") - slogan and picnic.

Leave it to the Left to be intensely political and also to enjoy themselves.  The neighborhood we chose to live in this year is without doubt a leftist one. Bill is collecting slogans and posters and will post them at some point.  I've included a few here that were put up for the street celebration.

Posters advertising the party; graffiti protesting gentrification.
The red flag in the distance is an ANPI flag.

A prize ceremony, showing the ethnically-mixed neighborhood. Not sure
what the prizes were for. The "prize" was a red ANPI neck scarf.

Basically our 2019 Liberation Day story is that we decided to walk out our door the evening of April 25 and within 2 blocks were in the midst of an enormous street party.  Pigneto was celebrating Liberation Day as perhaps only Pigneto - a mixed social class and ethnic neighborhood with leftist roots going back to Pasolini - can.  The photos and captions above and below illustrate the day.


Dianne

Bars popped up where none had been before. Musicians too.
Those open store fronts to the right are bars without any signage that
haven't been open before while we've been here, and may not be again.
One wonders if they are licensed, legal, etc. But, hey, it's Pigneto!

Again, a street near us, usually quiet, now spilling over with customers,
and, yes, it's a car-driving street.

There were games - foosball, ping pong - babies, dogs,  you name it.

Basically a message to the governments of Rome and Lazio (the province in which Rome sits):
"Over our territory, we will decide!"

A good time was had by all.

Best Posters of 2016

"Best" Posters has become a yearly feature of RST, and here we are once again, offering the "best" of 2016, all found in Rome in April, May and June.  Though the internet has doubtless eroded the presence and influence of posters in Italian culture, they nonetheless have a role here that they don't have in the U.S.--except perhaps in times of political upheaval like the late 1960s.  I am tempted to claim that postering is more common in societies with a significant leftist heritage--they were a significant feature of the visual landscape in China in 1979, for example, when we were there--but I can't say for sure that's true.

Postering also appears to aggregate in specific places.  Some locales in Rome--especially outlying suburbs--are more likely than others (e.g. the Centro) to have large numbers of posters.  We found an especially rich lode in Serenissima, on Rome's outer eastern side.

What makes a poster "best"?  Design.  A compelling message.  A story we haven't heard, or, if we do know the story, the sense that the poster reveals something quintessentially Italian or Roman.  In 2016, as was true in 2015, some of the best posters are those done by the far-right fringe.  They're angrier, and that can make for more compelling posters.  And most of the centrist political posters--ubiquitous during the run-up to the Rome mayoral election--are pedestrian.

Still, the left can produce some decent posters.  The one below at least goes beyond Vota Communista ("vote Communist").  It's both weird and refreshing to see that Italian Communism still exists; it all goes back to the important role played by Communists in the Partisan movement that battled the German occupation during World War II.  Today, according to the poster below, the enemies of the Communists are petty politicians (politicanti), the European Union, NATO, and the banks.

Enough! (vote Communist Party).

This poster (below), which appears to be part of the student mainstream at one of Rome's great universities--La Sapienza--strategically links the current generation of anti-fascists with the partisan wartime resistance:

Yesterday partisans, today anti-fascists.
What's with the German?

Resistance is also the theme of the poster below, authored by an organization (we presume) called Partizan.  Although the poster would seem to be appealing to thoughtful people ("Thinking people must resist"), the gas-masked figure looks anything but thoughtful.

Casa Pound, a right-wing bad-boys organization named after the American poet, Ezra Pound, who cozied up to the Mussolini regime in the early 1940s, is perhaps the most frequent posterer in Rome, helping to keep the form alive.  The Casa Pound folks are opposed to immigration, and beyond that they're big on not surrendering to the powers that be.  They appear to relish physicality and to locate their heroic heritage in ancient Rome.

Alcuni Italiani Non Si Arrendono!
"Some Italians Don't Surrender!"

"What is written with the blood of the fathers is not erased with the saliva of the politicians."

A close-up of the upper left portion of the above poster:

Scary dudes

The Blocco Studentesco ("Student Block"), responsible for the poster below, is a 2006 offshoot of Casa Pound, focusing on school issues.

Not quite sure what's doing on here.  "They Aassault/We Laugh!" Joyous resistance.

Once in a while the poster left gets its act together and posters against Casa Pound.  This poster grounds its opposition in an open immigration ideal--in Italian multiculturalism.

And mostly in English

As in the United States and England, there's strong opposition in Italy to international trade agreements that presumably cost workers jobs.  The message below is significant: No al TTIP refers to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a proposed trade agreement between the EU and the United States that's been in the works since 2014.  The anti-TTIP folks are concerned that the nation states of Europe will be victimized by transnational corporations--especially, according to the poster's graphic, American companies

"Let's liberate ourselves from the 'Liberators'"

 Also under attack are austerity measures advocated by wealthy, creditor countries (like Germany) and imposed on poor, debtor countries (like Greece, Spain, and, to some extent, Italy). A decent graphic here (Piano B [Plan B]), but the poster's too busy to be visually arresting.

One of our design favorites is this poster, of uncertain political ideology.  It reads Roma non si vende"--"Rome is not for sale."  And it communicates this message with a delightful image of the Coliseum in a shopping cart.

Another top-design candidate is this anti-immigrant political poster ("We'll Stop the Alien Invasion"):

The poster below is austerely anti-design.  And yet its message--Siamo Già Tra Voi ("We are already among you") and signed "(hashtag) Enemies of the City," is compelling in its mystery and threatening tone.

The "What Happened to Dino?" poster that we found near Porta Metronia was mysterious, too, because we had no idea who Dino was.

Do you know what happened to Dino?

The most common poster in April was, understandably, the one below, announcing Liberation Day: 25 April.  It's not obvious why the date April 25 was chosen in 1946.  Although Liberation Day in general celebrates Italy's liberation from the horrific German occupation--and honors the resistance to the occupation--the country was not actually entirely free of the Nazis until May 1, 1945.  According to some sources, April 25 is important because on that date the National Liberation Committee of Upper Italy (CLNAI) proclaimed in a radio annoucement the death sentence for all Fascist leaders (Mussolini was killed 3 days later).  Others note that April 25 was the day Turin and Milan were liberated from the Nazis.  More than you needed to know.

Bill
For the best of... 2014 and 2012, check the links.