The Museum - which was made possible thanks to the generous bequest of the writer’s manuscripts, correspondence and personal effects by his daughter, Letizia Svevo Fonda - was inaugurated on December 19, 1997 (Svevo’s birthday). It is located on the 2nd floor of the Trieste Public Library, which the Triestine writer frequented as a young man and which is described in Una vita. Among Svevo’s personal effects which now form part of the Museum’s collections are the writer’s bookcase, which figures in two portraits of the period and bears the monogram of intersecting initials on the glass panels that has become the Museum logo; Svevo’s violin, which he played both at home and in private local performances with his quartet, and the gold fountain pen Livia gave him to mark their engagement. The pen has given rise to a curious debate, for one of Svevo’s last plays bears the inscription ‘with the gold pen’, and critics are in disagreement as to whether this is the title of the play or merely a reference to the pen used in writing it. Few of Svevo’s personal effects have come down to us because the Veneziani villa and adjoining factory were destroyed by an Allied bombardment on February 20, 1945. The bombardment also destroyed most of Svevo’s library, forcing scholars to make educated guesses when attempting to reconstruct it. A few books have survived, however, including first editions of his own works, various volumes given as gifts to his wife during their courtship or in the early years of their marriage.