Singing and Claiming"Bella Ciao" on the Radio: Exile, Memory, and Fascism

Caroline Waldron, University of Dayton

In 1984, Studs Terkel, a legendary progressive journalist and radio host, interviewed Lisa Sergio. Sergio had been Benito Mussolini's English translator and hosted myriad fascist radio shows in Italy before fleeing in 1937. Terkel started the interview with the song, "Bella Ciao," the anti-fascist partisan hymn that became legendary during WWII and continued to be sung by leftist activists throughout the century. Terkel's interview with Sergio serves as a prism through which I analyze the migration of "Bella Ciao." The movement of the music itself and those who sang it changed over time. Though indelibly linked to Italian history, and very much a diasporic phenomenon, "Bella Ciao" never was central to second generation Italian American identity despite the fact that the song became a global phenomenon, and had a resurgence in popularity in Italy during the 1960s folk scene,

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 28. Diasporic Identities