Museo Joyce

Thanks to an out-of-date guidebook, I found an unexpected delight--the best kind--awaiting me at a library that once housed a small collection of materials related to the Irish author's residence in Trieste.

While James Joyce is perhaps the most internationally renowned author associated with Trieste, he's hardly the only one. The city decided to celebrate its literary history by building the Museo LET"S, or museum of literature, which includes the Museo Joyce. Its opening in 2024 coincided with the 70th anniversary of Trieste's "definitive" return to Italy. Joyce himself may not have have appreciated the tie-in, as dissatisfaction with Italian rule was a factor in his decision to leave the city for good in 1919.

LET"S is as welcoming as a cozy bookstore.

A newsstand collection celebrates coverage of the city in print media

Italian movie stars--even those from Naples--sold plenty of magazines in the Fifties and Sixties.

Posters for films featuring Trieste comprise one gallery, with an adjacent theater showing actual clips.

Coincidentally, when I returned to my hotel room, the New York Times reported the death of Claudia Cardinale, "Italy's Girlfriend."  The obituary makes no mention of Senilita, but you can watch it on YouTube.

Soft lighting and a black leather couch, the kind you would expect to find in a shrink's office, seduced me into taking a break in another gallery.

Jet lag prevented me from paying closer attention to the genesis of the strange but compelling film I watched about Trieste's relationship with psychoanalysis. At the age of twenty, Freud spent time in the historically unmoored city (then part of Austria) working in a zoological institute associated with the University of Vienna. His research? Searching (fruitlessly) for the reproductive organs of male eels! His time in Trieste seems to influenced his psychoanalytic theories.

I foggily seem to remember the film's narration is excerpted from a novel written by Italo Svevo, one of two local writers whose careers LET'S also examines comprehensively.  A statue of Svevo greets visitors outside the museum.  The colored fabric behind him memorializes "the victims of femicide, lesbicide and transfemicide."

Likeness as literary metaphor!

Joyce and Svevo became besties when the former championed Zeno's Conscience, rescuing the novel--in which a psychoanalyst prescribes memoir-writing as a form of therapy (I can relate to that!)--from obscurity.

Joyce also drew the Jewishness of Leopold Bloom, a fictional character so iconic that his birthday is celebrated by English majors worldwide, from Svevo.

The text-heaviness of the museum's Joyce section was a bit of a let down in this multimedia context.

While living in Trieste for two periods that altogether lasted more than 15 years before and after World War I, Joyce re-worked the essay that eventually became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, completed Dubliners, the short story collection that includes "The Dead," and began conceiving Ulysses, his masterwork.  

Early 20th century film footage of life in Trieste during Joyce's residence supplement the detailed timeline of his life.  

But as you can see from my smile, the part of the museum I liked the most exhibited Ulysses-related art.

Illustration for Bloomsday Trieste by Robert Berry (2013)

"Calypso Breakfast, Bloomsday Trieste" by Paolo Colombo (2011)

Note the similarity of Leopold's mustache and hat to Svevo in the photo above.  The entirety of the VERY long novel takes place on June 16, 1904, forever to be known as Bloomsday.

Bloomsday Poster (2019)

Bloomsday Poster (2020)

 "Telecali Macoypso, Bloomsday Trieste" by Andy Prisney (panels 1& 2, 2021)

I wonder if LET"S would be interested in acquiring this poster which has adorned 47 Pianos since 1982 when I publicized the traveling exhibit for The New York Public Library?

More Northern Italy

Trieste

Sunny Trieste

Castello di Miramare

Museo Revoltella