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  A garish neon street sign namechecking what was once Ireland’s most notorious red light district is part of an Italian city’s bid to claim our best-known literary son. Monto was located close to the modern-day Connolly Station in central Dublin and infamous for its brothels which featured in the Night Town chapter of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. When darkness falls in Trieste, a red-lit sign in a narrow alleyway flickers on and off to spell out the letters MONTO. The gaudy lettering linking the Northern Italian city to the Irish capital is part  of a series of light-themed installations which commemorate Joyce who “exiled” himself here after fleeing Dublin’s parochialism in 1904. Then aged 22, he was accompanied by his Galway-born partner, and future wife, Nora Barnacle. Both their children Giorgio and Lucia were born there.  Joyce worked as an English teacher in Trieste to support his family while writing his first novel A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man and the opening chapte
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Montenegro - travels in Black Mountain country

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Crna Gora is the Serbo-Croat for Black Mountain, but it is by its Italian translation that most people know Montenegro. In terms of breadth and width Montenegro is tiny, around 150km in both directions, making it a fifth of the size of Ireland. But in terms of height it is a towering nation, with wave after wave of mountain ranges rolling out into its hinterland. Montenegro was the last of the former federal republics that once made up Yugoslavia to break away from Serbia just over a decade ago, a much less painless and non-violent process compared to its neighbours in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. While for now most visitors stick to its impossibly picturesque coasts and around the Bay of Kotor where the mountains plunge to the sea, there is a sense that this is an eco-tourist paradise on the verge of discovery. The coastal towns and villages show clear Italian influences, with cobbled streets, piazzas, Venetian-style palaces and small Catholic Churches. But alongside these are onion-do
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Nature's wild medicine

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THERE is something life enhancing about being knocked off your feet by a huge wave  rolling in from the Atlantic Ocean and crashing onto the shore. It is an almost primal feeling as the churning sea washes over you and you are tugged in 10 directions at once by the bubbling, hissing tide. Scrambling to my feet I turn and wait for the next one, wallowing like an excited child as again I am knocked flying by the breaker and dragged down to be tossed about under water. Much has been written in recent years about the healing properties of sea water but there is also something psychologically liberating about swimming in the wild. The beach I am on is in a particularly wild place off the coast of Co Clare where layers of limestone seem to flow off the Burren and into the ocean. When I last swam here on a sunny say at the start of the summer the beach at Fanore was packed, but now as autumn is setting in it is much quieter and there are just a few others enjoying the freedom of swimming in t
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Book Review: Antonio Muñoz Molina

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  In a world of climate change, political extremism, wars, mindless violence, and disconnection from our fellow human beings Antonio Muñoz Molina travels into an alternative reality of literature, music, and art. He writes: “I like literature that has the disruptive and intoxicating effect of wine or music, making me forget myself, forcing me to read it aloud and to give in to its contagion, explaining the world to me while setting me at war with it, giving me shelter even as it reveals the horror of everything around me as vividly as its beauty.” Yet the written and spoken word can both be liberator and captor. The words of advertising slogans, newspaper headlines, news reports, and overheard conversations on the streets and on the Madrid metro at times seem to reach an unbearable crescendo. “I become aware of the full volume and intensity of the endless noise that I failed to notice even as it was drowning out my voice and everything else around me,” he writes. For him the world seem
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Have Murcia on me

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Tony Bailie hikes through the lunar landscape of Murcia's badlands, climbs a forest-covered mountain, visits 'snow wells' and peeks into a former TB sanatorium to see if any ghosts turn up... An ancient sea floor pushed upwards over millions of years formed Barrancos De Gebas which lies about an hour's drive out of Murcia city. Barrancos means ravines and dozens of them – chalky white, rising and falling away from one another – give this place an other-worldly feel. Despite the sparse vegetation, earning it the title of The Badlands, it is a rich habitat for hundreds of butterflies and moths. It has been a protected area since 1995 and its unique desert landscape shimmers with an eerie whiteness in the morning sun. The barrancos form a hinterland for Sierra Espuña, which in contrast sees lush green forests rising along a series of not-too-high but impressive mountains. The greenery of this area is thanks to an early 20th century environmentalist called Ricardo Codorníu
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Time to bring back the bears

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  AS EVENING turns into night a bat flits just above my head through the darkening sky. Nothing too remarkable about that, you might think – but then this is Transylvania. On top of a hill overlooking the village is an eerie-looking fortress but I decide not to venture in – not out of fear, you understand: What could there be to fear about entering a creepy building in Transylvania as bats swoop overhead and night falls? The reason is actually much more banal – a sign on the wall says opening hours are between 10am and 6pm and it is nearly eight. As for the bats, there are actually 32 species of bat in Romania, one of the most diverse populations in Europe – we have just nine species here in Ireland. However, despite such a variety of these winged creatures of the night there are no vampire bats in Transylvania; they are native to South and Central America. The village of Viscri dates from the 12th century when Saxons from Germany settled in the area. Cattle and geese roam the main str
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Manchán Magan's is out standing in his field

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THE churning water rears and foams and then drops away as if a plug has suddenly been pulled from the rocky confines in which it had become trapped. The rectangular hollow on a fossil-covered limestone outcrop looks as if has been hewn by hand to create a swimming pool, but it is a natural feature on the Atlantic shoreline of Inis Mór, the largest of the Aran Islands. Poll na bPéist is translated on the signs that guide visitors to it as 'The Wormhole'; however, on some maps it is named 'The Serpent's Lair'. 'Poll' is an Irish word for hole which can also be used to describe an animal's lair while 'péist' can mean worm, serpent or even monster, so both translations are valid. While the idea of a serpent's or monster's lair is more evocative, the word wormhole also has intriguing connotations – describing the underground channels through which the currents surge and retreat from the open sea into this deep rocky pool from which, if you jum
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