by InTrieste
Trieste will join cities around the world in paying homage to Joyce’s greatest work on Friday, 16 June with live plays, music, art exhibitions, debates, and readings inspired by the text.
The action of Joyce’s Ulysses, recognized as the seminal work of literary modernism, is set on a single day in Dublin, June 16, 1904, and features protagonist Leopold Bloom’s encounters with characters inspired by the Homeric hero’s adventures.
Admirers of Joyce set up the first Bloomsday in Dublin on June 16, 1954 and the celebrations have since spread to several other cities including Trieste where Joyce, then a struggling English teacher, wrote the first part of his masterpiece and met major local writers Umberto Saba and Italo Svevo.
Trieste’s knotty dialect is believed to have inspired some of the word play in Ulysses. Although most of Ulysses is based on memories of Dublin, the shabby grandeur of Trieste and its teeming poly-ethnic underclass fired the writer’s imagination. Trieste’s former red-light district in Cittavecchia is believed to have been a prototype for the ‘Nighttown’ of Ulysses.
Trieste, among other things, is a key Bloomsday venue along with the other cities where Joyce lived, Dublin, Paris and Zurich, where he died aged 58 in January 1941. Keeping this in mind, Museo Joyce together with Comune di Trieste and PromoTurismoFVG organized a movable feast starting from 9 am on June 16 with a breakfast at the Adriatico club.
You can find the full program here: www.museojoycetrieste.it and here.
