Literary Trieste: Joyce, Svevo, Saba.

A literary crossroads too

Trieste, a free port and crossroads of cultures, languages and trade: it’s in this setting that, between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the city also became a literary crossroads, hosting or shaping three names that would mark European literature.

James Joyce

The Irish writer lived in Trieste for more than a decade starting in 1904, working as an English teacher: one of his students was Italo Svevo himself. It was in Trieste that he began writing Ulysses and completed Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The city remembers him with a bronze statue on the Ponterosso bridge, caught mid-stride crossing it.

Italo Svevo

The pen name of Ettore Schmitz, born in Trieste, Svevo is the author of Zeno’s Conscience, one of the foundational novels of twentieth-century Italian literature. It was his friendship with Joyce, his English teacher, that encouraged him to keep writing after years of little recognition.

Umberto Saba

A Trieste-born poet, Saba is inseparably tied to the city through a physical place that still exists: the Libreria Antiquaria Umberto Saba, on via San Nicolò, which he ran for most of his life and which still operates today under the same name.

How to experience this itinerary

You don’t need an organised tour: just a morning and the will to walk unhurried through Borgo Teresiano, the Ponterosso bridge and the historic cafés all three of them frequented: Caffè San Marco itself still carries that atmosphere almost intact today.