La Bella Gigugin

La Bella Gigugin is heard in Donnafugata on the day of the plebiscite, when young men singing its verses turn a gay tune into a mournful-sounding refrain. Its performance places popular music inside a political spectacle: the streets carry signs of public assent, but the result will later be shown to conceal dissent.

Performance on the plebiscite day

The day is windy and grey. Tired groups of youths pass through town with scraps of paper bearing “yes” tucked into their hat ribbons, singing verses of La Bella Gigugin. The tune does not remain gay in this setting: the narration describes it as becoming a kind of Arab wail, and generalizes that gay tunes sung in Sicily tend to undergo this transformation. The song’s altered sound makes the scene’s patriotic display feel less like untroubled jubilation than a local idiom reshaping imported political enthusiasm.

The singing belongs to a day crowded with competing forms of persuasion. A few visitors from Girgenti recite Leopardi’s lines about Sicily’s “magnificent and progressive destiny” to peasants who listen silently. The youths’ affirmative tokens and their song provide a more public, performative expression of assent, while the silent listeners offer no comparable verbal endorsement. The account sets these gestures beside one another without treating them as proof of a unanimous popular will.

The tune amid public ceremony

Later, Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, casts his own “yes” vote, and Don Calogero Sedàra announces the official total that night: 512 votes cast and 512 affirmative, with none recorded against. Celebrations follow, including applause, speeches, fireworks, and messages to the new King and the General. La Bella Gigugin is not reported again in those festivities, but its earlier, transformed performance stands within the same sequence of music, slogans, and civic ritual.

That sequence is shadowed by the gap between the official count and what the reader learns afterward. Don Ciccio Tumeo tells Don Fabrizio that he voted no, but that his choice was erased and entered as a yes. Don Fabrizio then recognizes that the plebiscite’s apparent unanimity has come at the cost of good faith. The song does not itself expose the fraud; its importance lies in how its mournful transformation anticipates the discrepancy between the day’s cheerful public signs and the suppressed reality beneath them.

Musical transformation and political irony

The passage makes the tune a small but pointed figure for the novel’s treatment of political change. A song associated in the scene with youthful, affirmative display is altered as it is sung, just as the plebiscite’s public form promises collective choice while its recorded result excludes actual opposition. The parallel is interpretive rather than a claim that the song directly comments on the vote: the tune’s change of mood helps give the surrounding ceremony an unsettled emotional register.

The scene’s irony deepens in the aftermath. Don Fabrizio concludes that what was lost was not simply a countable number of negative votes but the newborn good faith that ought to have sustained the new order. La Bella Gigugin’s brief appearance thus belongs to a larger contrast between patriotic performance and damaged civic trust: the tune survives as a sign of how celebration in Donnafugata is already inflected by unease.