On Friday, August 7, 2026, DaShoW Principal Investigator Dr. Matteo Brera spoke in Fanano, in the Modena Apennines, about the life of Primo Bartolini, the man the town sent to Nashville in 1908, whose story DaShoW helped bring back to public memory last autumn with the unveiling of a historical marker in Tennessee.
The talk, held on the afternoon of August 7, was part of the public program accompanying the exhibition “La salvaguardia delle diversità culturali. L’emigrazione dall’Appennino modenese negli Stati Uniti,” on view at the Sala degli Scolopi in Fanano from August 1 to October 19, 2026. The exhibition is promoted by the Department of Law and the Interdepartmental Research Center on Discrimination and Vulnerability (CRID) of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, together with the Accademia Scientifica, Letteraria ed Artistica del Frignano “Lo Scoltenna” and the Municipality of Fanano.
Primo Bartolini (1889–1959) was born in Fanano and emigrated to Nashville in 1908. He became the first foreign-born resident of Tennessee to enlist in the U.S. Army during the First World War; co-founded the Nashville Conservatory of Music with Gaetano Salvatore De Luca; and was the first white faculty member to teach at both Fisk University and Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial State College, two historically Black institutions. He also wrote hundreds of poems on love, nostalgia, and patriotism, many of them about the mountains he had left behind.
Speaking to an audience of residents, families of emigrants, and visitors to the exhibition, Dr. Brera situated Bartolini’s trajectory within the DaShoW project’s broader argument: that Italian-language newspapers, associations, and schools in the U.S. South did not merely record migrant life but actively taught migrants how to position themselves — socially, culturally, and racially — in a segregated society. Bartolini’s career across two historically Black colleges makes him an unusually revealing case in that story.
The Fanano exhibition is the first stop in the project's United States tour, which will move to Montefiorino between October and December 2026, before the full exhibition finds a permanent home in the Chiesa dell’Emigrante at Groppo di Riolunato. More than 150 students from the Istituto Cavazzi of Pavullo and Pievepelago and the Istituto Sacro Cuore of Modena took part in collecting the testimonies, photographs, objects, and family histories on display.
DaShoW thanks the Municipality of Fanano, Visit Fanano, the CRID, the Department of Law of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, and the Accademia “Lo Scoltenna” for the invitation and warm welcome.
