James Joyce’s Trieste

There’s more out there in the travel world than a trip to Dublin for serious James Joyce fans. The peripatetic writer spent 11 years drinking and writing in Trieste, the port city in northeast Italy. The Boston Globe featured a travel story Sunday about Joyce sites there. It turns out, from a writing standpoint, that Trieste was good to Joyce. He wrote “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” there, most of “Dubliners,” and he even began “Ulysses” in the city.

Writes William A. Davis:

Trieste is a place you have to seek out, for it’s not on main travel routes. Many seekers are literary travelers looking for traces of Joyce, a struggling, unknown writer when he lived here, but honored now as one of the city’s literary lions.

Besides the statue on the canal bridge, there is a bust in a park and a public flight of stairs is named for him. The Joyce Museum, which occupies a room in the public library, has a collection of rare first editions of his books and shows a video about his life in the city.

GoNomad also has a story about Joyce’s Trieste. And The Joyce Museum in Trieste has a Web site, too.

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