On my way to the cafe here in Trieste, I walk past the Scala Dublina, the Dublin stairs. It’s number 12 on the official James Joyce tour of the city, and the rest of the walk will take you to a cafe he liked, a restaurant where he ate, the shore where he went swimming with his son. (You will not find on the tour the apartments he was thrown out of when he couldn’t make the rent or again when the woman he was living with out of wedlock, Nora, started to show signs of pregnancy.) A bespeckled Joyce peers at you from the side of the stairs, on his little commemorative plaque, to let you know the great man himself used to walk up and down these stairs so many years ago.
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