It was where Keats died, where Goethe had roamed the Forum and Joyce’s great hero Ibsen spent many happy months. Perhaps Rome, with all its mysterious splendour and history, could inspire him to greatness. Tracing the footsteps of Rome's foreign writers and artists.To make matters worse, the school director absconded, leaving the school in disarray and Joyce without a regular income. Joyce even lured his brother Stanislaus to Trieste, knowing full well the extra income would help maintain his indulgent lifestyle. Many people befriended Joyce and seemed endlessly willing to help him and his wife as they struggled to come to terms with the realities of raising a young family.īut Joyce was a restless and flamboyant character whose fondness for alcohol worried his wife and riled his English school employers. He had made quite an impact on the expatriate community and their hangers-on. Since leaving Dublin, Joyce had been living in the Adriatic coastal town of Trieste, in northeast Italy.

Into this tension walked 24-year-old James Joyce a man desperately trying to escape tensions of his own. Pope Pius X, still smarting from his loss of the papal states some 30 years earlier, refused to move beyond the sanctuary of St Peter’s while the Savoy family, his rivals and Italy’s new monarchs, built rather grand monuments, empty gestures of grandeur. Joyce may have been inspired to write The Dead during his unhappy time in Rome.

Gens De Dublin by James Joyce