Dublin: Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett Bridge

Hello from Dublin, Ireland! The lovely person with me is my daughter Barbara and the smiling gentleman on the rock with a is Oscar Wilde. He sits in front of a small sculpture of his pregnant wife in Merrion Square Park:

Across the street is the Oscar Wilde House, 1 Merrion Square:

Every time when I prepare a new post for this blog about Ireland, I will add one of his quotes. Here is my favourite one:

I am very glad I have travelled. Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one’s prejudices.

Here are some pictures from our first evening walk along the River Liffey in Dublin:

It was a perfect evening to take beautiful pictures of the Samuel Beckett Bridge designed by the famous Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.

Few months ago I presented a building in Toronto designed by this amazing architect in the post:

Toronto: Santiago Calatrava’s Brookfield Place.

The bridge is named after the Dublin-born author Samuel Beckett, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969. It has been suggested that he got the idea for the design of the Beckett Bridge by tossing a coin which landed with the harp facing upward, so he put the instrument lying on its side. True or not, the bridge is the most impressive feature crossing Dublin’s river, but also an appropriate one, as the harp has been the national emblem of Ireland for many centuries. Opened in 2009, the bridge is unusual in that it rotates horizontally to let ships pass.

Source: Peter Harbison and Leslie Conron Carola, Ireland: A Luminous Beauty, Thomas Dunne Books, St Martin’s Press, New York.