A Walk Through Italo Svevo’s South London

Last year on a trip to Trieste, Italy, with my son, we visited the James Joyce Museum. Trieste had lodged itself in my a corner of my mind since working as an English teacher in Modena and watching the film, Nora starring Ewan McGregor as a young Joyce during his years working as an English teacher in Trieste in the early 1900s. A number of things stood out in the museum which was also dedicated to a number of significant Triestine literary figures. One was the extent to which the city of Triest had influenced Joyce’s writing. Another was the relationship between Joyce and one of his students, Italo Svevo who with the encouragement and support of Joyce wrote what is widely considered one of the great modernist works of literature, Confessions of Zeno (or Zeno’s Conscience). Svevo had also been the model for the character of Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s most celebrated work Ulysses. And what most piqued my interest, that Svevo had lived in Charlton, South London for a number of years and…