From Canada to New Zealand, from Lithuania to Italy, and many other countries in between, Bloomsday will be celebrated on June 16th. James Joyce is associated with Dublin, Paris, and Zurich, but for those among you whose Joycean scholarship is a 'bit on the rusty side,' you may not be aware of James Joyce ́s very strong connections with the city of Trieste in northern Italy. For starters, James Joyce’s novel Ulysses tells the story of one Leopold Bloom as he goes about his life in Dublin on June 16, 1904.
It could be argued that the inspiration for Leopold Bloom may not have been a Jewish man from Dublin at all, but rather one Ettore Schmitz, a Jewish paint seller from Trieste! How Joyce ended up in Trieste in 1904 is a story in itself. The family came to be in Trieste through a series of non-connected events in which James Joyce and the love of his life Nora Barnacle were ‘collateral damage’ in acts of subterfuge, swindling – and even espionage, none of which was their own making. However, Joyce liked Trieste so much, and indeed one could say Trieste liked James Joyce, that the city was to be his home for 15 years.
Sign up to IrishCentral's newsletter to stay up-to-date with everything Irish! After arriving in Trieste, he was hired to give English lessons to a young girl Letitza, daughter of the aforementioned Ettore Schmitz. In February 2000, the young girl Letitza, by then a woman in her late sixties, explained that meeting James Joyce changed all their lives dram.
