Bella Ciao is the album that kick-started the Italian folk revival in the mid-1960s, made by Il Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano, a group of researchers, musicians, and radical intellectuals. Based on a contested music show that debuted in 1964, Bella Ciao also featured a double version of the popular song of the same title, an anti-Fascist anthem from World War II, which was destined to become one of the most sung political songs in the world and translated into more than 40 languages. The book reconstructs the history and the reception of the Bella Ciao project in 1960s' Italy and, more broadly, explores the origins and the distinctive development of the Italian folk revival movement through the lens of this pivotal album.

List of abbreviations of the archive funds
Acknowledgements
Prologue (in the form of a picture)
INTRODUCTION
1. A song, a show, a record
2. Popular music and politics in the "boom" years
3. Communism, ethnomusicology and folk revival
PART 1. The myth of Bella Ciao
4. Meet the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano
5. One week in Spoleto
6. Constructing the myth: the countess, the colonel, the rice picker
7. Bella Ciao in the theater: protest and distinction
8. After Spoleto
9. Bella Ciao on disc: antagonism and the market
PART 2. The performance of "real" folk
10. Organizing folk: the structure
11. Curating folk: the repertoire
12. "Bella Ciao" of the partisans
13. "Bella Ciao" of the rice pickers
14. Performing philology: Giovanna Marini's "fakes"
15. Staging folk: direction, sets and costumes
16. Strumming folk: the arrangements
17. Singing and learning to sing folk: the voices
18. Sounding folk: the studio recording
CODA: Us and them
Notes
Index