Trieste is celebrating a marathon version of its annual June 16 Bloomsday celebrations of James Joyce's Ulysses to fete the 100th anniversary of the publication of one of the world's most famous and least read literary masterpieces.
Theatrical productions, musical concerts, art exhibits, dance spectacles and live painting performances will fill the Italian city's day starting from eight in the morning and ending at three in the morning - and will be specially extended this year until Sunday June 19.
The calendar of events for Trieste's edition of the world-wide commemoration named after the novel's protagonist Leopold Bloom has been promoted by the Joyce Museum in the northeastern former Hapsburg port where the great Irish writer lived intermittently from 1904 till 1920 and where Ulysses was born, to be published in Paris in 1922.
Also backing it is Trieste University, PromoTurismoFVG, the Trieste Convention and Visitors Bureau, and Politeama Rossetti.
The publication by the then little-known bookshop and publishers Shakespeare & Co. on February 2, 1922, his 40th birthday, propelled the Dubliner into the literary firmament after earlier and smaller success with Dubliners (1914) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
On June 16, the day on which the action in Ulysses takes place, Trieste is holding events in places in the city that have been ideally twinned with those in the novel, from Number 7 Eccles Street where Stephen Dedalus and Leopold and Molly Bloom have their breakfast, up till the famed final monologue of Molly/Penelope which will be performed at two in the morning at the Museo Revoltella.
Among the other events are a concert by the Irish duo Fathers of Western Thought, Robert McGlade and Gordon Lee, dedicated to the Sirens chapter, a performance of Nausicca on a sunset beach at 'Pedocin', featuring famed actor Sergio Rubini and Maria Grazia Plos, and a rendering of the Oxen of the Sun, penned by Matteo Verdiani and Carlo Selan and voiced by the Artifragili theatre company.
A Joycean walking tour of the city where he taught English - notably to great Italian writer Italo Svevo - will be on offer until Sunday, dubbed LETSwalk, also roaming over wider Triestine literary production including Svevo's masterpiece The Conscience of Zeno.
Among the guests at this final event will be poet and playwright Moni Ovadia, writers Mauro Covacich and Edoardo Camurri, and singer-songwriter Morgan.
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