“When I die Dublin will be written in my heart” (James Joyce)

How to separate Dublin and James Joyce? You can “meet” him in   Earl Street North or  you can “see” him talking with Joseph Oliver St. John Gogarty (Anglesea Street) and you can also ”step” on the famous Mr. Leopold Bloom’s face, for example on Westmoreland Street (every day I walk on his face  to reach my English Language School ). In other words, to “meet” the legendary writer is not so difficult: at 35 North Great George’s Street you find the James Joyce Center; in Great Denmark Street there is the “Belvedere College”, a school he attendedand and  where he set also a few chapters of “Ulysses“, the Irish Writers Museum has many works by Irish writers, including works by Joyce and if you reach Sandycove, you can visit the James Joyce Martello Tower, where the writer lived and where he set the first scene of Ulysses. And what about Mr. Bloom and ”his” places? On the Bloomday, June 16 (or any other day of course!), you can organize a small trip and go to Upper Ormond Quay and see the New Ormond Hotel, where Leopold met his firends or to Prince’s Street, where  the headquarters of the famous Freeman’s Journal was located, where Bloom worked as a publicist. If you’ve read the book and you are in front of Sweeny’s Pharmacy (Lincoln Place), you notice that it is still just as Joyce describes it! And why not to have a beer at Davy Byrne’s Pub (21 Duke Street), where Bloom met his friend Nosey Flynn or to go to 7 Eccles Street, where now there is  a hospital, but that was Leopold Bloom’s house? To learn English Ireland, in Dublin, the city that  was loved and hated by Joyce, often means also to learn “literary”! ;)