H and I had been to Stockholm years ago arriving in the middle of an August heatwave so humid we didn’t do nearly as much as we’d planned. Consequently, my memories of the city were hazy, although the image of a young woman taking a piglet for a walk has stayed with me. We thought we’d try a winter break to see what we’d missed.
Our first morning was spent wandering around Gamla Stan, the pretty cobbled old town, full of buildings rendered in various shades of ochre no doubt to offer an illusion of warmth in winter although, for us, it was only a few degrees colder than home.
The afternoon was given over to the magnificent Vasa Museum, home to a fearsome warship so poorly designed it sank just a thousand metres into its 1628 maiden voyage, remaining submerged until salvage began in 1961. The ship is quite astonishing, huge and impressively decorated even stripped of the vivid colours it would have originally been painted. An amazing piece of restoration, aided by the mud that had preserved the ship and its contents, which is still continuing today.
It was such a gorgeous day on Thursday that we spent much of it outdoors, walking through Djurgarden, a lovely, forested island, alongside lots of locals enjoying beautiful views in bright winter sunshine.
Visiting the Swedish History Museum took up much of Friday. Two of its three floors are devoted to the Vikings, including an extensive display of exquisite gold jewellery. They were largely an agrarian society who did not wear horned helmets, apparently, nor spend all their time marauding and pillaging, although they did build an extensive empire stretching as far as what is now Iran. The third floor offered a whistle-stop tour of the rest of Swedish History including a gold gown made for Queen Margareta of Denmark which turned out to be a copy of the fourteenth-century original but still gorgeous.
I know very little about Scandinavian art so was keen to visit the Modern Art Museum housed in an airy, spacious gallery not far from where we were staying. The most interesting exhibits for me were two views from the same window, one by modernist painter Sigrid Hjertén, the other by her husband Isaac Grünewald. Hard to imagine how their work could have been more different. I’ll leave it up to you to guess which is which.
On our last afternoon we visited the Hallwyl Museum whose bonkers vestibule we’d spotted one evening. Wilhelmina von Hallwyl used her fortune to accumulate a large collection of art and artifacts housing them in a town house with rooms decorated in a variety of historical styles, including one with a startling number of ornate weapons on display plus two suits of armour. It reminded me of the Russell-Coates museum we’d visited in Bournemouth although not quite so extravagantly eccentric.
Just time for a quick walk around lovely Gamla Stan after Sunday breakfast before heading home. We’d packed so much more into our four winter days than we managed on our first Stockholm visit. It’s a beautiful city with lots of watery views to admire. Our only disappointment was the lack of snow.
And the book? Rachel Connolly’s Lazy City is set in Belfast where Erin has returned after her best friend died in London, to be faced with her mother’s fury, a relationship which really should have run its course but she can’t seem to abandon and the possibility of another with an American new to the city with his own past to trouble him. It’s a moving portrait of a young woman lost in grief, probably best read with more attention than I had to give.
Back to books on Friday…
