In Nashville, Primo’s career took off quickly: soon 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verses display an idyllic and nostalgic vein that characterizes Primo’s poetic production, which amounts to over 500 unpublished poems.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 devoted 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, in Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, 189).
