Civilians fill the streets of Milan, Italy, on April 25, 1945, to celebrate their liberation by Italian partisans from German Nazi forces and the fascist regime. Many believe the famous Italian anti-fascist anthem “Bella Ciao” to be associated with World War II, but the song gained widespread popularity only a few years after World War II.

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One of the unfired bullet casings authorities are saying was found with the gun used in the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk is apparently inscribed with lyrics from a famous, old Italian anti-fascist anthem.

The words “O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao” form the chorus of “Bella Ciao” — a song with murky origins and an evolving legacy ranging from being sung by workers in the rice fields of 19th-century Italy to appearing in a contemporary TV show and video game.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox described the lyrics along with other inscriptions found on discarded bullets during a news conference on Friday, when he announced the arrest of a 22-year-old suspect in the assassination.

Cox identified the suspect as Tyler Robinson of Utah and said that investigators recovered bullets used in the assault that bore inscriptions on them.

A misunderstood song with murky origins

Sung annually on April 25 during Italy’s Liberation Day (Festa della Liberazione), which commemorates the liberation of Italy from the fascist regime and Nazi occupation, “Bella Ciao” is a much-mythologized song in Italian culture.

The song is also sung around the world, with artists as diverse as Tom Waits, Becky G and Yves Montand contributing versions over the years.

“It’s been performed in almost every language from Albanian to Yiddish,” said Stanislao Pugliese, a professor of modern European history at Hofstra University whose work encompasses the anti-fascist resistance. “So it does seem to strike a chord across borders, across cultures.”

The song’s jaunty, earwormy tune composed in the major key has equally catchy lyrics. They begin romantically enough: “One morning I woke up / Oh beautiful hello, beautiful hello, beautiful hello, hello, hello.” But then the tone quickly devolves into political tragedy, telling of a “partisan” who “dies for freedom.”

“People often think of ‘Bella Ciao’ as a partisan resistance song,” said Diana Garvin, an assistant professor of Italian at the University of Oregon, who has written a study on the song. “And while that is true, it’s only a small slice of the story.”

According to Garvin, Pugliese and other sources, the song has its roots in Italian folk music. It first became popular in the 19th century among women migrant laborers, called mondine in Italian, who performed exhausting and poorly paid weeding work in the rice fields.

“‘Bella Ciao’ is probably one of their most famous songs,” Garvin said, adding that the lyrics most people know today concerning the dying “partisan” were not the same as those sung by the mondine. Their version focused on the hard life of being a seasonable laborer in the rice fields. “The narrator of the song describes the terrible conditions of the work between the mosquitoes and being knee deep in mud,” said Garvin. “There are water snakes that are flashing past their legs.”

As the song unfolds, its lyrics get angrier and more political. “They talk about improved workers’ conditions and that one day they will work in freedom and liberty,” Garvin said. “So what you see in this song is the dawning awareness of an international workers’ movement that’s gaining steam.”

Garvin said “Bella Ciao” eventually became more than a work song about the hardships of being a mondina. The song became part of labor actions starting in the 1920s with the rise of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

“The working conditions become even worse because there is the battle for grain. Italy is not producing enough wheat for its bread and its pasta, so Mussolini needs these underpaid workers even more,” said Garvin. “Under that strain, they start to organize strikes.”

Garvin said the mondine used “Bella Ciao” to help organize their political actions, including railroad strikes. “They’re able to coordinate across distances without letting people know exactly what’s going on by singing a scrap of a song that has a meaning to somebody who’s been singing it for years but that someone outside of the rice paddies won’t be aware of,” she said. “And they were actually able to get the eight-hour workday established in Italy during the darkest years of fascism.”

Rebirth during the postwar period

Contrary to popular belief, “Bella Ciao” was not widely sung as a resistance anthem during World War II. Garvin said the song reemerged after the war with new lyrics.

“People think of it as a partisan resistance song because there is a second set of lyrics that today are much more commonly sung,” Garvin said. The newer lyrics, whose authorship remains contested, are no longer about a female rice field worker. “This time, it’s generally thought of as a male partisan who is leaving the house saying goodbye to his love and assuming that he will not return, that he’ll die in the fight,” Garvin said.

The song gained enormous popularity in this guise during the 1950s and 1960s, especially in a version sung by the Italian diva Milva. Milva was known to sing the song on different occasions with both the old and the new lyrics.

“In the 1950s and ’60s, Italy experiences an economic boom. Everyone starts to do much better, and the song starts to become more commercialized. You start hearing it on popular radio shows,” Galvin said, adding that “Bella Ciao” became a torch song in 1968, with the rise of student protests in Italy and elsewhere.

“Bella Ciao” in our times

“Bella Ciao” has taken on a new significance in recent years through its appearance in pop culture.

A version sung by the American singer Becky G was used in Money Heist, a popular Spanish TV thriller series that debuted in 2017 and concluded on Netflix in 2021. The official video of the song on YouTube has been viewed nearly 60 million times and has elicited more than 11,000 comments, including newly posted references to the fatal Kirk shooting. (“This video is about to get alot of attention,” wrote one commentator on Friday, echoing the sentiments of many others.)

“Bella Ciao” has also been used in the Far Cry 6 video game, in a version titled “La Bella Ciao de Libertad,” credited to La Sonora Yarana. According to a Far Cry 6 fan page, “La Bella Ciao de Libertad” is a “revolutionary rebel song op[p]osing the tyrannical regime of Yara’s supreme dictator, Antón Castillo in the Far Cry 6 universe.” (According to a Reddit post by musician Luchito Muñoz, who worked on the soundtrack, La Sonora Yarana is not a real music group’s name but, rather, a fictitious name created for the video game.)

“Bella Ciao” and Charlie Kirk

As commentators speculate about the motives of Kirk’s assassin, scholars share concerns and sadness over the way in which lyrics from “Bella Ciao” have become implicated in the crime.

“The entire situation is heartbreaking,” said Garvin. “I think more than anything, it speaks to an ascendant moment of political violence.”

“Our culture, our political situation seem to mirror very much the situation in Italy in the early 1920s,” Pugliese said. “Mussolini was a new political animal on the landscape, and the Italian political establishment was simply not prepared to deal with it. And I think that this whole decade, much of our political establishment, both on the left and the right, have proven themselves to be incapable of understanding what is actually going on in this country. And that could lead to some kind of political extremism like we’ve just seen in the last couple of days.”

Pugliese said the events of this week have changed the song forever for him. “It has become the anthem of the anti-fascist and anti-Nazi resistance, a song that we sing every April 25 celebrating the liberation from fascism and Nazism,” he said. “And I’m not sure that we’re going to be able to sing that song again in the same way with this shadow hanging over us.”