JOIN USBella Ciao from the balcony
A ‘goodbye’ song, which has said hello to many centuries, people from several countries and movements of different hues, is at it again — saying hello from balconies in Corona-hit Italy.
Bella Ciao (goodbye beautiful), apparently began life as a folk number, first sung by women working in the fields in northern Italy. Later, it became a go-to cry of the anti-fascist movement and gained worldwide recognition with its lyrics being tweaked to reflect the fight against Nazis during World War II. This revamped version has been used in the Netflix series La Casa de Papel/Money Heist, where most of us heard it first, let’s admit. And fell inexorably in love with.
Incidentally, several versions of Bella Ciao have been sung worldwide — sometimes as a hymn of resistance and other times as an ode to freedom. In February, in fact, a group of Palestinians released an Arabic version to protest against US President Trump’s proposal for a Palestinian-Israeli deal.
Today, despite its rather morbid lyrics that are a little too apt for the Corona pandemic, it is reverberating from balconies in Rome and other cities where people have been quarantined or are in isolation.
Videos of it being played on the saxophone by Italian men in sharply-ironed suits and sung in throaty abandon by women in nightwear (while the rest of the onlookers join in the chorus, clapping to its addictive rhythm), have gone, well, viral.
Amazingly, a song that was just two months ago considered nothing more than club-level sexy, has acquired (or re-discovered, should we say) contours of strength, emotion and, yes, resistance. Only this time, it is helping, in its own musical way, humans fight viruses rather than fellow beings.
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