The big Dublin literary landmarks will be known to anyone who works with books. Joyce's tower in Sandycove, where Ulysses begins: Howth Station, where Yeats saw Maud Gonne, Pallas Athene in her neck and her straight back; Synge Street, just south of St Stephen's Green, where Shaw was born on the very edge of the genteel world.

There's the Green itself, on to which the transplanted Englishmen Cardinal Newman and Gerald Manley Hopkins looked out from the infant University College, and Elizabeth Bowen - a volunteer intelligence agent - looked out from the Shelbourne Hotel, watching the native Irish for any anti-British leanings, during the second World War.

But even the most familiar material can be looked at anew. The connoisseur of Joyce's Dublin, for instance, may decide that a fragment of Leopold Bloom's city pilgrimage wonderfully preserved is the one where he turns into Cumberland Street, opens the naughty letter ("weak joy opened his lips"), passes under the railway arch, and is prompted by the church in Westland Row ("the cold smell of sacred stone") into a meditation on priests, missions, Molly, men and choirs, and the Roman Catholic Church ("wonderful organisation certainly, goes like clockwork".) The atmosphere of these streets and of the church itself is very much as it was.

Above all, Bloom continues to "Sweny's in Lincoln place. Chemists rarely move. Their green and gold beaconjars too heavy to stir" and buys Molly a cake of "sweet lemony wax". Sweny's is still there, and you can buy lemon soap there, and do what Bloom did: "He strolled out of the shop, the newspaper baton under his armpit, the coolwrappered soap in his left hand."

Crossing back towards the centre of the city, through Trinity College, thoughts may turn to Samuel Beckett. But the true Beckettian will continue on across O'Connell Bridge to Abbey Street, where the lovelorn Mr Neary, in Murphy, took his broken heart: "He instructed the hall porter in Wynn's to send any telegrams addressed to him from London across the street to Mooney's, where he would always be found. There he sat all day, moving slowly from one stool to another until he had completed the circuit of the counters when he would start all over again in the reverse direction.

"He did not speak to the curates, he did not drink the endless half-pints of porter that he had to buy, he did nothing but move slowly round the ring of counters, first in one direction, then in the other, thinking of Miss Counihan."

At this point the literary visitor may choose to go in one of many arcane directions. In Granby Lane off Granby Row off Parnell Square for example, not far from the Writers' Museum, there is a plaque on the wall of one of the new buildings which marks the "spot where the servant of God Matt Talbot collapsed and died on Trinity Sunday" in June 1927.

The myth of Matt Talbot, the saintly Dublin former alcoholic, is wonderfully explored by Thomas Kilroy in his play Talbot's Box.

Or one can explore the geographical details of the life of the 18th-century kept woman, Mary Crosbie ("red haired, and consequently prone to venery") which are recounted in The Memoirs of Mrs Leeson, edited by Mary Lyons.

"Fortune threw in her way a Mr C- of the College who, liking her, and having plenty of cash, took lodgings for her at an apothecary in Capel Street where she exercised her natural powers with the best subjects that offered. Poor H, considering himself the original cause of her misfortunes, scraped up be every industry a few guineas and took lodgings for her in Aungier Street where he visited her occasionally and brought her some good culls . . . but happiness alas! is seldom permanent - H-'s friends being acquainted with the proceedings, checked him severely and prevailed on him to swear he'd never see her more. Again destitute of a protector she went and lodged with a Miss Boys of Longford Street, of detested memory, who was the cause of a Mr Barlow's death, son of the widow Barlow; here she passed some miserable days, till she met with a captain Misset who took an house for her in Mecklenburgh Street . . . " THIS is one way of learning your Dublin streets. Or you could just stand, and feel. At the end of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls the naive heroine stands on the pavement near O'Connell Bridge, waiting for her glamorous lover to collect her, to take her away. "We were meeting outside an amusement palace on the quays. It was convenient for him to pick me up there, as he came from his office, but neither of us had thought of the rain when we fixed the place.

"I stood in the porchway that led to the sweetshop and put my case down . . . " He didn't come, of course. The rain continued. Many a reader never passes that commonplace spot without remembering the girl and her breaking heart. Others just notice the rain.