Family
Primo Luigi Bartolini was born in Fanano, a small village tucked away in the Modenese Appennine (approximately 50 miles southwest of Bologna) on 10 May 1889.
Son of Giuseppe Bartolini and Possidonia Ottonelli, Primo was an alumnus of the University of Bologna, where he earned his degree in literary studies before graduating in Switzerland and leaving his homeland. He was admitted to the United States on November 20, 1907.
In the US, Bartolini was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree from Conception College, in Missouri, before finally moving to Nashville in 1908.
Primo wrote most of his poems in English, including one addressed to his mother (Mamma), however very few of them are in Italian. Among those written in his native tongue, he dedicated one to Italy.
In this poem, he transfers allegorically the concept of motherhood to his homeland (Madre Patria), a place of which Bartolini lauds the ‘gentle’ language, the beauty of landscapes and skies, the courage and resilience of the soldiers fighting in the trenches of the Piave.
Immigration
In Nashville, Primo’s career took off quickly: only two years after his arrival, he was employed as a modern languages teacher at Boscobel College for Young Ladies. The school closed in 1914, and Bartolini dedicated a long poem to it (Boscobel).
These verses display an idyllic and nostalgic vein that characterizes Primo’s poetic production, which amounts to over 500 unpublished poems.
To his transnational experience and to the recollection of memories of a place ‘over there’, Primo Bartolini devotes a substantial part of his poetry.
The double tension between nostalgia for the motherland and a sense of deep commitment to becoming an American is evident in many of his poems, which represent allegorically its transition from Italianness to Americanness.
The theme of the journey, in particular the one across the sea, is also filtered through evident reminiscences of Italian culture, most notably Petrarch’s poetry (Passa la nave mia, colma d’oblio, Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, 189).
House on 5th Avenue South
Among the founders of the Nashville Conservatory of Music, directed by fellow Italian Gaetano Salvatore De Luca, Cavalier Bartolini was now regarded as a leading scholar in the South.
In the early Thirties, while Bartolini was being considered for the chair of Modern Languages at Vanderbilt University, his wife Maria Cardinale travelled from Naples to Tennessee to finally join him.
(Bartolini in the Catalogue of the Conservatory of Music, Photograph of G. De Luca, Group photograph faculty)
Maria and Primo bought a plot of land at 511 Fifth Avenue South in Nashville. The new Poet Laureate of The American Legion (Post 5) and his wife could not have chosen a better place to match Primo’s fame as an untiring patriot, because that was the very same lot on which the dwelling of Captain William Driver had once stood.
While excavating the still intact foundations of the old seaman’s house, Primo came upon a long narrow stone with the name “Driver” carved in it. He subsequently decided to use a great deal of stones dug out of the ruins of Driver’s old home to build – by himself – his own house, a rectangular structure whose walls included stones that Bartolini collected from Independence Hall and from the tombs of presidents Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Polk, Lincoln, Grant, Garfield, McKinley, polymath Benjamin Franklin, and Confederate general Robert E. Lee, among others.
Maria crowned the finished patriotic mausoleum by knitting a small flag in memory of “Old Glory,” which flew for years from a staff atop their little home.
The house on Fifth Avenue, transformed into a duplex in modern times, stood until 2015. Sadly, following in the footpath of many other historical buildings of Nashville, it did not survive the relentless advance of progress and was demolished to make space to yet another high-rise building.
Nashville and Tennessee in PB's Poem
A proud Nashvillian, Primo Bartolini liked to use his adopted city and, more in general, Tennessee as the backdrop for some of his poems. Several of his lyrics have women as protagonists and are placed within the familiar setting of Downtown Nashville, of which he also describes aspects of the ‘underground’ life thus venturing into the poetic description of less than conventional topics such as betrayal and underage prostitution, although always described with a pitiful, consolatory vein. (Downtown, She is from Nashville, On the Corner of 5th Avenue)
Nashville and Tennessee also offer Primo the ideal setting for his contemplation of loneliness and displacement, as the dark streets of the city and the rural countryside trigger nostalgic and somehow woeful recollections of his lost Italianness and a subtle pessimistic vein, probably absorbed through the reading of yet another canonical author of Italian letters such as Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837).
For Primo Bartolini, poetry is also the means through which to scathingly and ironically attack “priests”, “bigots” and “women”, in a way that recalls the Italian medieval satirical vein of Cecco Angiolieri (S’i’ fosse foco… If I were fire…). However, poetry is also a way to mourn and celebrate the passing of a local hero such as fellow Italian Antonio Alonzo Rozetta, who died in 1920 after twenty years of service as a Chief of the Nashville Fire Department.
Patriotism
After his appointment at Boscobel College for Young Ladies ended, Primo Bartolini spent a couple of years working, first as a cook and then as a waiter, at Antonio Petruccelli’s chili parlor before the war frenzy spread through the country.
When President Wilson promulgated the Selective Service Act of 1917, under which all males aged 21 to 30 were required to register for military service, Bartolini showed no hesitation and volunteered. His number (854) was drafted and he became the first foreign-born resident to be selected in Tennessee.
Primo Bartolini’s popularity surged among Nashvillians (and beyond) and his speeches at the Italian Club (which had received chartered status in 1908) became more and more frequent, especially after the Italian defeat at Caporetto in 1917.
His fellow Italians presented him with a “beautiful Italian flag made of silk” that bore “five stars in honor of five nephews of Primo” who were in active service on the Piave front.
Now regarded as “a prominent Italian of Nashville,” Bartolini composed a poem in blank verse about the “anguish and sorrow” of war but also the “fire of patriotism” he felt for his Motherland, while the local press lauded him as the most fervent non-Tennessean American patriot.
In 1918, The New York Sun awarded Bartolini the first prize at the “Sock Song Contest,” the competition dedicated to “patriotic knitting” compositions.
Primo accompanied his entry with a statement that displayed his sentiment for his adoptive country: “I am an Italian, but now am a citizen of this Country. I am within the draft and await with pleasure my call. I am indeed glad to do my part fighting the Huns.”
The 10-line poem that earned him first prize is titled Because She Knows that I Must Go, and must have impressed President Wilson who sent Primo a congratulatory note. Unfortunately, this has been lost.
After the experience of the war, Bartolini publicly channeled his Italian patriotic feelings toward his adoptive country; his revolt against the invaders and defense of the homeland’s sacred borders from the enemy accompanied a shift in his identity from Italian to American.
Bartolini signed his naturalization papers and became an American citizen in 1921, thus rejecting the authority of the King of Italy Victor Emmanuel III, who had knighted him for his services to the Italian cause during the Great War a few months earlier.
This identity shift is well visible in the manuscript corrections to the poem My Italian Flag, which is remodelled into My American Flag.
