Trieste, Italy, is on the uneasy border where northern Italy flares out to touch Yugoslavia, with Austria hanging just above it like a storm cloud. It was James Joyce's favorite city. I went there in 1983 to see what 500 years of Hapsburg rule (until 1918) on top of Italian rule had produced. Unexpectedly, it proved to be more interesting as Joyce's city.

More than Dublin, which Joyce immortalized in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, more than Zurich, where he is buried, more than Paris where he wrote Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake; Trieste claims James Joyce.

"Where did Joyce live?" I idly asked a clerk in the tourist office, and suddenly she came to life.

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