Europe's most convivial capital — where 1,000 pubs have perfected the art of conversation, Trinity College guards the oldest illuminated manuscript in the world, and literary giants from Swift to Wilde to Beckett to Heaney lived within a square mile of each other
Dublin (590,000; metro 1.4 million) is the capital of Ireland and one of the most visited cities in Europe — a compact, walkable city of Georgian terraces, Viking foundations, and a pub culture so embedded in social life that the Irish government formally protects the 'public house' as a social institution rather than merely a drinks license. Trinity College Dublin (founded 1592 by Queen Elizabeth I) holds the Book of Kells (c. 800 CE), a ninth-century illuminated manuscript of the four Gospels considered the masterpiece of medieval Insular art, in the Long Room — a barrel-vaulted library of…
Dublin (from the Irish 'Dubh Linn', meaning 'black pool') was established as a Viking settlement in 841 CE on the south bank of the River Liffey; an earlier Irish monastery had occupied the site from approximately 630 CE. The city became the capital of the Anglo-Norman Lordship of Ireland in 1171 following Henry II's invasion and remained under British administration until Irish independence in 1922. The 1916 Easter Rising, in which around 1,600 Irish Republicans seized the General Post Office and other buildings in central Dublin, was militarily suppressed within a week, but the subsequent e…