Primo Bartolini moved to Music City from Fanano (Modena, Italy) in 1908, after a short experience as a teacher in Indiana, and he was the first non-native of Tennessee to be drafted in 1917 to serve for his adoptive country in the First World War.
One of the founders of the Nashville Conservatory of Music, directed by fellow Italian Gaetano Salvatore De Luca, Cavalier Bartolini was regarded as a leading man of letters in the South.
Together with his wife Maria Cardinale, Primo bought a plot of land at 511 5th Avenue South in Nashville, the very same lot on which the dwelling of Captain William Driver (the unionist seaman who named 'Old Glory' the American flag) had once stood.
A poet and a scholar, Bartolini wrote more than 500 poems on nostalgia, love, and patriotism that are still largely unpublished and constitute the bulk of the collection that has been recently acquired by Nashville Metro Archives.
They document the uncommon life, works and integration path of a proud Italian Nashvillian whose intellectual and family heritage has now found its new home.
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