16th June...

With a hint of nostalgia and poetry whispered into my ear by the sea, I imagine my day with James Joyce. In Trieste. It must be dawn, essentially dawn, because dawns in Trieste are wonderful. The city slowly wakes up and, like it doesn’t want to jeopardize the dreams of the city, it’s quiet. On the Riva, in a soft fog, HE waits for me, the great James Joyce. He’s standing with his hands in the pockets of his tweed coat, while his hat casts a shadow over his face and his eyes sparkle with that weird, intellectual flame. 

His soft Irish accent whispers:” Morning in Trieste smells like salt and verses”. We walk slowly by the sea. Seagulls circle above us, he talks about language, the music of words, how for him Trieste is more than a city- it’s rhythm, breathing, the gut of Europe. We stop by in the old café „Caffè San Marco “, where he used to write and drink espresso with the smell of cognac. Inside time has stopped. Wooden panels, brass details and books that keep quiet on the shelves. Joyce orders two espressos and adds: “Here I imagined for the first time Stephen Dedalus wandering around Dublin. Trieste gave me my first sentence.”

Afternoon finds us on the San Giusto hill. The view is astonishing across the red roofs and blue horizon. The sun paints the stone streets in gold, while wind carries the traces of history. We laugh, talk about love, about his Nora, my perhaps made-up romance, and how words can be kisses on paper. For dinner we go to a small trattoria hidden in a narrow street. He chooses wine – of course red, robust and tells me how sometimes he would sing to earn for dinner, how he taught sailors English and dreamt of Paris while he wrote “Ulysses”. We talk about the meaning and meaninglessness of life, the beauty of yearning, how it’s easy to fall in love with a city that breathes like a human. Night falls. We sit on a bench in Mol Audace, quiet. But the silence between us isn’t empty, it’s full of sea, moonlight and unspoken sentences. Looking in the distance, he says quietly: “Trieste is a city that never stops telling a story. Maybe because every love here is a bit uncertain”. And while the wind tangles our thoughts and our hair dances to the music of the waves, I know this wasn’t a day that belongs only to me, nor Joyce, but to everyone who believes that words are the most beautiful way to love.

The evening is of course accompanied by wine and books. We drifted into the golden-blue color of Trieste at night. We return to „Caffè San Marco “, where the tables are now half empty, and light dimmed, warm, almost secret. We sit in a corner, between two bookshelves full of old books. Joyce carefully takes out one – an old edition of Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. He pulls his palms over the cover; it looks like a greeting. “Like someone you loved lives in every book”, he says, quietly, more to himself. The waiter brings a bottle of red wine from Friuli and two glasses. The first glass goes quietly, talking about the language, music, and women who were lighthouses in his storms. The second glass brings laughter, and the third- those quiet moments between two people when nothing must be said. We talk about Nora, who waited for him, how she wrote him letters full of small everyday details that were sacred to him. And then he asks me: “Who waits for you while you wander through words?” I stop. Maybe no one. Maybe the words alone. He smiles, as if he already knows the answer. After the wine, we take a walk one last time, slowly, to the train station. The city is now almost empty; you can hear only footsteps echoing on the stone and the occasional sound of a night tram. He leaves for Zurich, I follow him. There another chapter awaits him, another silence. At the station, in the dark, Joyce gives me a fragile, but strong hand. “Words are home. Write them as if you’re making a place where someone could stay.”

Trieste is silent, but I know that I will come back again, aware that on that day I drank wine with the soul of a writer, and that he left inside me a sentence that maybe I’m yet to write.
To Joyce, Trieste was a place of love, pain and the search for identity. There he wasn’t just a mere passerby, but a part of the city’s soul, a reflection of every step he took there. With all its contrasting beauty, Trieste became a stage on which Joyce won and lost parts of himself, giving the world a timeless masterpiece For this Irishman, one of the most important periods of his life took place in this city. Here he wrote some of his most significant works: the short story collection “Dubliners” and the novel “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, and began work on the legendary Ulysses. Here, his son and daughter were born. In Trieste, he faced countless struggles to publish >“Dubliners”,.changed jobs frequently, moved from place to place, and eventually suffered complete financial collapse. But above all, he embraced the city in all its beauty and the opportunities it offered him. He befriended the Italian writer known by the pen name Italo Svevo, with whom he frequented taverns and brothels. Yet this was also a city where, in his tempestuous life, he just as often attended Orthodox services at the Greek Orthodox Church and opera performances at Teatro Verdi. Trieste would permanently shape the relationship between Joyce and his wife Nora. In a letter to her, he once wrote that he had left his soul in Trieste—a city where they lived for sixteen years, and where so much of their shared story unfolded.
Joyce is more than a writer – he’s a creator of worlds, a visionary who shaped the language, art and our thinking about everyday life. Trieste was a place where this genius writer found peace and inspiration for creating masterpieces that will forever change the course of literature. Bloomsday reminds us of Joyce’s strength to transform an ordinary day into a momentous piece, and to remind us of the magic in everyday life. In Ireland, the world, but also Trieste, Joyce is a legend who continues to inspire, provoke and motivate to think about that uncatchable, and through Joyce’s literature, magical world we live in. Joyce met Nora shortly before he wrote her that famous letter and arranged a date for the 14th of June. She didn’t show up at the agreed time, but it’s almost certain that their first romantic date took place on the 16th of June, which is remembered as the date when “Ulysses” took place, and later “Bloomsday”, a day when we celebrate one author, the most important book, one life. In Trieste, on Bloomsday, you don’t just walk through space, but also through a soul. When the evening falls, and the light blinks in the water, you will know you are in a place where both books and people become eternal. That’s why, wherever you are on the 16th of June: in Dublin or Trieste, or any other city in the world, grab a book by James Joyce and hurry to celebrate Bloomsdayto celebrate the life of a great author who immortalized the love of his wife in one date and novel which became a part of all of us.

JJ Beba