Liberation Day, the proposal of the Democratic Party: “Bella Ciao becomes the official anthem of April 25”

A hymn that remembers a date. A music that echoes throughout Italy and in every ceremony that celebrates the Liberation Day. With this objective, the Democratic Party has presented a bill that makes Hello beautiful the official song of April 25th. An initiative that actually dates back to a few months ago, as the dem explains Stefano Vaccari, first signatory of the pdl together with Marco Furfaro And Mauro Berruto. “The text of the provision – he says – was assigned to the Constitutional Affairs Commission of the Chamber on November 29, but has since ended up in a drawer. Now, given that everyone says, even in very recent interviews, that Liberation is everyone’s celebration that those of the Resistance are values ​​to be shared, I appeal to the majority to vote as soon as possible on the provision to make the law operational as early as next April 25”. A request that however seems to clash with the reluctance of the government Melons to distance himself from the Fascist period.

The origins of Hello beautiful

Retracing the history of the birth and diffusion of Hello beautiful, Vaccari underlines that its origin is prior to the period of the Resistance and the partisan struggle. If “the song can be traced back to some popular songs widespread since the early 1900s in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines”, reads the report of the dem accompanying the bill, the definitive version appears years after the end of the Second World War . The origin of the melody, on the other hand, “goes back to before the 20th century and is lost among the songs of the Slavic popular tradition”. It is documented that the oldest trace of the music is “a 1919 recording, on a 78 rpm disc, by the gypsy accordionist Mishka Ziganofftitled Klezmer-Yiddish swing music“.

Klezmer, explains Vaccari, “is a Yiddish musical genre in which various elements converge, including popular Slavic music”. The song matured and spread “in different periods: between the mid-1950s, at a time when politics needed to unify the various souls of the Resistance – communist, socialist, Catholic, shareholder, liberal and monarchist-Badoglia – and the mid-1960s, with the popular recognition obtained in 1964 at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto” where two versions of the text are presented: the one that recounts the working day of a weeder and the one that recounts the partisan struggle.

The DC Congress of 1976

The congress of the DC, which in 1976 elected the partisan secretary Benigno Zaccagnini,recalls Vaccari concluded with the notes of Hello beautiful. It follows, observes the dem, that in the 1970s that song “responds to the need to consolidate, with a clear peacemaking spirit, the concept of a national unity born of the resistance struggle”.