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Friday, September 08, 2006

James Joyce In Trieste




The top picture is of a statue of Joyce on a bridge in Trieste. Below that is the apartment buiding where he lived on the second floor.


Trieste was one of my favorite cities. It was very mellow, a bit on the rainy side - when we were there, anyway. And the people were very nice. It was almost like visiting another country - it had an eastern european flavor to it. That's why I ended up there, I had never been to a communist country and I wanted to visit one - Yugoslavia was still in existence then. The stories of Trieste being a city of spies was too much to pass up.
What I didn't know was that it was home to James Joyce for alnost 10 years and that the first episode of "Ulysses" was written there

posted by Nikon at 8:38 PM

2 Comments:

Blogger Meg said...

Is the top photo a statue of him in Trieste? Is the apartment still in existence? Did you find the Berlitz school where he taught English (or did he not teach in Trieste, I can't remember.)

I read Joyce for my Bachelor's Degree, and hated him back then, but you can't escape Joyce, ever. I finally went to Dublin in 2003, some 20+ years after college, and it was all worth it.

5:40 PM  
Blogger Nikon said...

Hi,
Yes the top photo is of Joyce and it is in Trieste. I can't tell you for sure if the apartment is still there( there were many). I wasn't thinking that much of Joyce's haunts back in the '80s when I was passing through on my way to Yugoslavia. I did fall in love with Italy, but have never been able to get back. Trieste was a great city, too, it's architecture was not quite like the rest of Italian cities I had been to. It was overcast and rainy the 3 days that I was there and it is a working city, with the shipping traffic. I think only suburbs of Milan and Rome had any visible "industrial" areas of the places I visited.
I never knew Joyce was as famous in Italy as in Paris and Dublin, until I started researching Hemingway's Paris (link above), as described in "A Moveable Feast."
I beleive Joyce's brother also worked for Berlitz in Trieste.
I agree, he is difficult to read :)
Here is a link with some more info:
http://www.gonomad.com/features/0602/trieste.html
Thanks for visiting,
Paul

8:43 PM  

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