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