This talk originates in my book project, Songbook for a Revolution: The Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano, Popular Culture, and the New Left in 1960s Italy. In it I analyze the political use of folk music through a critical history of the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano (NCI), a leftist collective founded in Milan in 1962 by Gianni Bosio and Roberto Leydi. They staged a series of radical live performances and produced vinyl recordings that provided a soundtrack for the student and worker movements of the 1960s and 1970s. I argue that this collective developed a musical counterculture that challenged existing political and cultural hierarchies and played a crucial role in the Italian New Left. My talk will examine the NCI’s scandalous Bella ciao performance at the 1964 Spoleto Festival. I consider how the group shaped working-class traditions as political provocation and the difficulties of reconstructing an ephemeral performance from the layers of narrative and memory that now surround it.
Rachel E. Love is a Core Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at New York University, having earned her PhD from NYU in Italian Studies in 2018. Her interdisciplinary research on modern Italy engages with Media, Cultural, and Performance Studies, as well as Oral History and Postcolonial Studies. Her articles on transatlantic cultural exchange and the intersections between Italian anti-Fascism and anti-colonialism have appeared in the journals Popular Music, Modern Italy, and Interventions.
