When James Joyce arrived in Trieste on October 20th, 1904, he was just 22 years old, unknown and penniless, and in search of a job as an English teacher. When he left the city for good in July 1920, he was one of the major figures of the Parisian “Roaring Twenties”. Between these two “James Joyces” are the years the writer spent in Trieste.

In Trieste Joyce wrote most of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his play Exiles, Giacomo Joyce, some of the poems of Pomes Penyeach and his articles for “Il Piccolo della sera”. He also began writing Ulysses. And if on the one hand Dublin is the pivot and centre of his masterpiece, Trieste was its incubator and its cradle.
Joyce was profoundly influenced as an artist and as a writer by the social and cultural forces of the city, and this influence is discernible in the characters of Leopold and Molly Bloom, both of whom display the ethnic, religious, linguistic, cultural, and even physical hybridism which Joyce knew in Trieste and which makes them into outsiders in Dublin, as the text often infers. The Blooms, instead, would have fitted in Trieste. They would have been at home, as were James, Nora, Giorgio and Lucia Joyce.