The James Joyce Centre is situated near the centre of Dublin City or “the Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis” as Joyce called it in his great work Ulysses. James Joyce once declared that if Dublin “one day suddenly disappeared from the Earth it could be reconstructed out of my book”. Though he would spend most of his life living in Continental Europe, Dublin would be the focus of almost all his major work.​ As he wrote to his brother Stanislaus on 24 September 1905, nearly a year after leaving Ireland for Italy: “When you remember that Dublin has been a capital for thousands of years, that it is the ‘second’ city of the British Empire, that it is nearly three times as big as Venice, it seems strange that no artist has given it to the world.”