John McCourt leading us through the streets of Trieste.
Joyce is everywhere in Trieste: a statue of him stands on a bridge overlooking the Canale Grande, just before the statue is the Passagio Joyce (Ponte Curto), tiny plaques are placed all over significant buildings that played a role in Joyce and Nora’s life, and there is even a hotel named after the author. Everywhere you walk in Trieste, Joyce isn’t too far away.
This Roman monument from the 1st century, the Arch of Richard, is located on the Piazza Barbaccan just outside of the hotel we were staying at. It has been said that Joyce enjoyed drinking his favourite wine at the restaurant located right next to the arch.
Like in Montreal, Utrecht and Dublin, Trieste had a walking tour that was associated to James Joyce. However, the walking tour in Trieste was not as literary as Dublin’s “In the Footsteps of Leopold Bloom” walking tour and Utrecht’s recreation of Dublin in their tiny Dutch streets. The James Joyce walking tour in Trieste is much more informational in terms of historical and biographical context of the city and of Joyce himself. And who better to guide us through Trieste than John McCourt who wrote a couple of Joyce’s biographies (The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904-1920 and James Joyce: A Passionate Exile) on his life in this city.
On our fifth day attending the Trieste Joyce School, John led a large group of us on a small trek through Joyce’s Trieste. He unfolded the importance of the port city to Joyce—particularly the places and the people that influenced Joyce’s creativity and his writing. It came to my surprise how much this city, besides Dublin, played such a huge role on Joyce’s life.
At the Piazza della Borsa. Joyce read his Triestine lectures such as “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages” inside this building.
Our tour began outside the city library which most likely still existed at the time that Joyce was living in Trieste. Just across the street from the library stood a statue of a man that played a huge part in the creation of Leopold Bloom: Italo Svevo. John explained how Joyce learned a lot about the Judaic religious background while tutoring Svevo in English at the Berlitz School in Trieste. From there we walked towards the Piazza dell Unita d’Iatlia where Joyce was accidentally arrested, the Teatro Communal (Teatro Verdi Trieste) where Joyce frequented to watch and listen to the opera, the church of Saint Nicolo where he visited as an outsider to hear a three hour sermon and then went home to rewrite “Sisters”, passed by one of Joyce’s nine homes, the Piazza Borsa where Joyce read his Triestine Lectures in one of its buildings, and then finally a quick stop at the Jewish Ghetto where the fictional character of Leopold Bloom was slowly created out of historical fact.
Looking up from the Jewish Ghetto where Leopold Bloom was born and where Joyce worked numerous small jobs.
John’s walking tour brought you face to face with a location that helped Joyce build himself as a writer that we are familiar with today. To read about Trieste and understand how it influenced Joyce is one thing, but to actually see it in reality is something different. The tour revealed a great pleasure to so many of your senses—to walk the streets where Joyce did, to see where he lived, to listen to the bustling atmosphere of the ghetto—all of this revealed a world of coherent space that was once a home and creative territory to the author. Even though there is a temporal distance between now and 1905-1920, there is still a tangible presence within Trieste’s buildings and winding streets that still speak to any admirer of James Joyce.
Connecting-the-Dots on Bloomsday 2014 