Like many “birds of passage”— immigrants who left the Old World with a view to returning home as soon as they had made enough money to secure a future for their families —Primo left behind in Italy his wife, Maria Cardinale, from Naples, whom he had married in 1925, four years after becoming a naturalized American.
They married in Italy, and Maria travelled to Tennessee only in 1929 to finally join her husband. The couple are listed in the Nashville City Directory for that year as members of the same downtown household at 421, 8th Avenue South.
A few months later, Maria and Primo purchased 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, as 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 large quantitt 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 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.
