It was based on a folk song of the late 19th century, sung by female workers of the paddy fields in Northern Italy (mondine) in protest against harsh working conditions.

During this time, the first stages of the rice plants' development, the delicate shoots needed to be protected from the difference in temperature between the day and the night.

Mondare was an extremely tiring task, carried out primarily by women known as mondine (plural; singular mondina), from the poorest social classes.

The atrocious working conditions, long hours and very low pay led to constant dissatisfaction and, at times, to rebellious movements and riots in the early years of the 20th century.

Besides "Bella ciao", similar songs of the mondina women included "Sciur padrun da li beli braghi bianchi [it]" and "Se otto ore vi sembran poche [it]".

Other versions of the antecedents of "Bella ciao" appeared over the years, indicating that "Alla mattina appena alzata" must have been composed in the latter half of the 19th century.

The 1963 version of Yves Montand shot to fame after the group Il Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano presented it at the 1964 Festival dei Due Mondi at Spoleto both as a song of the mondine and as a partisan hymn, and the latter so "inclusive" that it could hold together the various political souls of the national liberation struggle (Catholics, Communists, Socialists, Liberals...) and even be sung at the end of the Christian Democracy (Democrazia Cristiana) 1975 congress which elected the former partisan Zaccagnini as national secretary".

Neither one nor the other born from partisans or fascists, one borrowed from a Dalmatian song, the other from the Tuscan student spirit and over the years it has become the official or de facto anthems of anti-fascist Italy and that of the Mussolini regime...

In the twenty months of the partisan war I have never heard people sing "Bella ciao", an invention of the Spoleto Festival.

Many artists have recorded the song, including Herbert Pagani, Mary Hopkin, Sandie Shaw, Goran Bregovic and Manu Chao.

In addition to the original Italian, the song has been recorded by various artists in many different languages, including Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Belarusian, Bosnian, Breton, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, English, Esperanto, Finnish, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Hebrew, Japanese, Kashmiri, Kurdish, Persian, Macedonian,[42] Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Occitan, Punjabi,[43] Russian, Serbian, Sinhalese, Slovak, Spanish, Syriac, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Ukrainian and Yiddish.

The song originally aligned itself with Italian partisans fighting against Nazi German occupation troops, but has since become to merely stand for the inherent rights of all people to be liberated from tyranny.

[71][72] In 2017 and 2018, the song received renewed popularity due to the singing of "Bella ciao" multiple times in the Spanish television series Money Heist.

As the presidential period of Duque ends in 2022, since 2019 the song, dubbed as 'Duque Chao', is sung and interpreted in protests in Colombia and by the diáspora, also during the national strike demonstrations of April and May 2021, in which citizens have been killed, injured and disappeared by state police forces.

[78][79][80] In March 2020, the song once again gained international attention after Europeans and Italians in lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy and Europe sang "Bella ciao" from the balconies of their housing complexes.

[84] Similarly, in 2024, left-wing MEPs sang "Bella Ciao" in the European Parliament on the occasion of a visit by Hungary's authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.