Svevo

Conspicuously read Italo Svevo’s 1898 novel “As a Man Grows Older” in a public place if you are, in fact, a man growing older — partly in order to see if it prompts interesting conversations with strangers but mostly because it is simply a funny thing to do?

Albert Camus, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Italo Svevo are among the male writers who get equally thoughtful treatment.

They belong in the same category as Samuel Beckett, Italo Svevo and Federico Fellini.

Among his students was Italo Svevo, the pen name of the Jewish writer and businessman Ettore Schmitz, the possible inspiration for Leopold Bloom.

While Joyce and Svevo are woven into Trieste’s skeptical and ironic fabric, d’Annunzio “doesn’t have anything to do” with the city’s literary tradition, said Marina Nadali, 77, a retired literature teacher.