A warm welcome

Stockholm is Europe's culture capital for '98

Author: By Christine Temin, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, April 12, 1998

Page: L1

Section: Travel

The ice house marked the start of Stockholm's 1998 reign as European Culture Capital, and its meltdown seemed to symbolize the warmth of the welcome visitors to the city this year can expect. Stockholm has even hired a woman whose job is to teach police, bus, and taxi drivers about the culture of the city, so they'll be prepared to answer questions. They'll have plenty to say: There are 1,000 events planned for the culture year, one-fourth geared toward children, who are much cherished in Swedish society.

First-time visitors to Stockholm are often startled at the fairy-tale beauty of the place, a series of islands linked by bridges, with old buildings painted in traditional ocher or red. Architectural harmony is prized here, especially in the older sections of the city, where no skyscrapers break the gentle lines of low buildings. Skyscrapers also cause canyons of darkness in city streets, and Stockholm in winter is already quite dark enough -- although Swedes know enough about outdoor lighting to make the effect magical rather than morose.

Stockholm is an architecture lover's paradise, a city whose scale is perfect for walking and whose buildings range from medieval to Art Nouveau to a refined Scandinavian modern. Two major cultural institutions are devoted to Swedish architecture. The older is Skansen, Stockholm's equivalent of Old Sturbridge Village or Colonial Williamsburg. Founded in 1891 as a Sweden-in-miniature, Skansen has 150 historic buildings, from peasant cottages to manor houses to a glassblower's hut, transported from all corners of the country and set on a 75-acre hillside. Craftspeople practice traditional skills here, and there's a zoo starring reindeer and other animals native to the North.

Although open year round, Skansen is best explored in the warmer months. (Or weeks. I once visited Scandinavia in August and was told it was too bad I couldn't come in the summer.) For an indoor alternative, try the newly relocated Arkitekturmuseet, part of a complex that also includes the new Moderna Museet, on the lovely little island of Skeppsholmen. With the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities next door to the two new museums, and an impressive collection of outdoor public sculpture sprinkled among the buildings, the island has become a cultural mini-capital on its own. And for the first time, the Moderna Museet has space to display 20th-century collections that turn out to be among Europe's best.

Both new museums were designed by the Spanish architect Rafael Moneo. Anyone who equates ``Spanish'' with ``flamboyant'' will be surprised by the extreme restraint of Moneo's Stockholm museums, which nestle modestly amidlow-lying 19th-century structures left from the island's former identity as a naval base. Much of the new Arkitekturmuseet, in fact, is housed in a former navy drill hall, imaginatively converted to tell the story of 1,000 years of Swedish architecture. A permanent scaffolding, a reminder of the process of building, forms a two-level spine running down the center of the huge hall. Suspended around it are models of all manner of Swedish buildings, from simple red country churches to Stockholm's glorious City Hall, site of the annual Nobel Prize banquet. (There are regular English language tours of City Hall; check with your hotel concierge.)

While City Hall looks vaguely medieval, with turrets and towers and a vast room lined with mosaics in 23-karat gold leaf, it actually dates from 1923. Among the first Nobel laureates feted there was William Butler Yeats, who waxed rhapsodic about the building, proclaiming that ``no work comparable in method and achievement has been accomplished since the Italian cities felt the excitement of the Renaissance.''

There's more faux medieval architecture in Stockholm's leading department store, NK, which has a stone exterior with a fortress feel. And there's a serious examination of life in that early era in the Museum of Medieval Stockholm, opened in 1986 on the site of excavations on Helgeandsholmen, the Island of the Holy Spirit. The museum's dramatic entrance is a vaulted tunnel dating from 1642, which brings you to underground galleries laden with bits of medieval architecture, religious artifacts, an exhibition on torture devices, and ``The Pilgrim Tapestry,'' a giant piece of contemporary folk art inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry in France. The Swedish version, embroidered by unemployed women over a two-year period, depicts a pilgrimage route culminating in the grave of St. Olav in Trondheim, in northern Norway, which, during medieval times, was to Scandinavia what Santiago de Compostela was, and still is, to Spain.

``The Pilgrim Tapestry'' is currently in the Medieval Museum but travels this summer to a permanent site in Ransby, in northern Sweden. It's ever so slightly irreverent. Among its large cast of characters are a couple of naked pilgrims who are having a jolly time in the sack, and one vignette deals with tax evasion, apparently rampant in the 15th century. This isn't the Medieval Museum's most dramatic exhibit, though: That honor goes to the remains of a 500-year-old oak boat used to transport people around the archipelago.

Another boat is the raison d'etre of the museum that is arguably Stockholm's most dazzling. The Vasa Museum houses a great sailing ship commissioned in 1625 by King Gustavus II Adolphus: So vast was the Vasa that more than 1,000 oaks were felled to build it. On Aug. 10, 1628, the Vasa finally set off on its maiden voyage; half an hour later, the vessel capsized and sank in the harbor. It was 333 years later when the Vasa was finally lifted out of the deep, hull miraculously intact. But divers also rescued more than 13,000 smaller fragments that had to be fitted together; the Vasa was the world's largest jigsaw puzzle. After nearly three decades of restoring the ship, the Vasa Museum opened in 1990, an instant success not only because of the ship itself but also because of sophisticated education programs around its well-preserved contents. And the museum building, by Swedish architects Hidemark & Mansson, is both magnificent and eccentric, a giant copper tent that echoes the shape of the ship inside, built just a few hundred yards from where the Vasa sank.

The Vasa is a ghost ship, like the one that Wagner's ``Flying Dutchman'' was condemned to sail until Judgment Day. The Vasa is also as alive with sculpture as a medieval cathedral. Its cast of carved characters includes voluptuous mermaids and strange, gnarled humans. The light in the museum is kept low, to protect the fragile wood, and the black oak has a silvery cast. There is something magical about its authenticity: It's not Disney, not a fiberglass replica. With over 750,000 visitors a year, it's become the most popular museum in Scandinavia, as it deserves to be.

Stockholm's National Museum is a typical building rather than a unique one like the Vasa Museum. What it typifies is the Italian Renaissance-inspired style so beloved by late-19th-century architects. It's a dignified structure, its galleries stately and symmetrical. In those galleries, along with the usual international suspects -- Rembrandt to Renoir -- is a delightful selection of work by Swedish artists, including: Carl Larsson, whose interior and garden scenes celebrate a rural lifestyle of storybook charm; Anders Zorn, who celebrated the intensity of midsummer revels; and August Strindberg, who is best known for his plays but was also a gifted painter of turbulent landscapes. The National Museum also allots considerable space to design and decorative arts, traditional Swedish strengths. Design displays range from the now-classic plastic mixing bowls of Sigvard Bernadotte to the sumptuous flora-and-fauna pottery produced at the turn of the century by the Rorstrand porcelain factory.

Along with the major museums are a host of small ones, dedicated to everything from dance to the postal system. One museum less well known than it deserves to be is the Royal Coin Cabinet on the island of Gamla Stan, which is devoted to the history of money, and displays currency all the way from cowrie shells, once used as cash, to modern credit cards. Among the enchanting exhibitions is one on piggy banks through the ages. The Royal Coin Cabinet also boasts an exceptionally good cafe called Myntkrogen.

Across from the Coin Cabinet is the Royal Armory, part of the complex that includes the 608-room Royal Palace, also open to the public. The armory's treasures include historic carriages, among them a 1777 rococo gilded sleigh, a gift from the Austrian Empress Maria Theresia to Sweden's ill-fated King Gustav III, who was assassinated at a masked ball in Stockholm's opera house in 1792, a strange tragedy on which Verdi based his opera ``Un Ballo in Maschera.''

The Royal Armory's major exhibition this year, up through August, is devoted to Gustav's wardrobe, literally cradle to grave. It starts with his silver-embroidered christening clothes and ends with the costume he wore to that tragic ball. Gustav was passionately interested in his clothes. He was equally passionate about the theater, and lavished much time and care on Drottningholm, the exquisite suburban palace where the present Swedish king and his family have lived since 1981, preferring its relative intimacy to the chill, vast palace in Stockholm. On the grounds of Drottningholm is the world's best-preserved 18th-century theater. Here, in summer, you can attend performances where the scenery includes wooden ``waves'' operated by stagehands in the wings: No computerized set cues here.

House museums are as popular in Stockholm as elsewhere: An artist's or collector's home transformed into a museum gives visitors a pleasantly voyeuristic opportunity to discover a lifestyle as well as a style of art. Stockholm's best house museum is slightly off the beaten track but well worth the effort to get there. It is Millesgarden, on the island of Lidingo, home to the Swedish-American sculptor Carl Milles from 1908 to 1931. Milles's allegorical figures fly, dance, perch on branches, ride bareback, skate, splash in fountains, or bend into the wind. Rarely are they still. While his works are scattered around the world, many, both originals and copies, are also in his erstwhile studio and home, and on their lovely terraced grounds, silhouetted against the harbor.

Most Stockholm visitors soak up Swedish culture through museums, but performing arts are another option, if one that requires a bit more planning. Theater is out unless you speak Swedish, but music and dance are possibilities. Their center in Stockholm is the Opera House. The current one -- a grand, looming structure with views of the Royal Palace -- replaced the one where Gustav was murdered, which was torn down. The ``new'' Opera House celebrates its centennial this year with a packed schedule. I was lucky enough to catch a performance of a new children's ballet, ``Fun in the Wings,'' by students at the Royal Swedish Ballet, which itself celebrates an anniversary this year -- its 225th, making it the world's fourth-oldest ballet company. The celebration culminates in June, with revivals of some of the daring works that arts patron Rolf de Mare commissioned in the 1920s for Les Ballet Suedois, a short-lived equivalent of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.

The next night, I heard a world-class performance of Bellini's ``Norma'' in the Opera House. Sweden, it's worth remembering, has a long tradition of great opera singers, Jenny Lind, Jussi Bjorling, and Birgit Nilsson leading the list.

Like the quintessential 19th-century opera house immortalized in ``Phantom of the Opera,'' the one in Stockholm is a world unto itself, incorporating a performing arts boutique, a take-a-number box office where the staff will help you in English, and six restaurants notable for food as well as convenience: A couple of them are open continuously from noon until the wee hours. The fanciest one is the Operakallaren, an aristocratic and slightly snobbish establishment that first opened in the old Opera House, in 1787. Here you can eat such Swedish specialties as reindeer, elk, and cloudberries. Here, too, is a particularly charming tradition: The kitchen will cook any fish you've caught in the waters between the Opera House and the Royal Palace, although how they'd know if you smuggled one in from somewhere else is a mystery to me. How comforting, though, to know that a fish caught in waters running through the middle of a bustling modern city is safe to eat.

To plan ahead, consult ``Stockholm '98,'' the city's official monthly publication through the Cultural Capital year. Its e-mail address is 98(at sign)kultur98.stockholm.se. The Web site is www.stockholm98.se.

Boston to Stockholm is a two-leg flight. I prefer to do the longer leg first, partly to avoid the nightmare of New York airports, so I flew through London on British Airways, which has eight flights a day from London to Stockholm.

If you're a Nobel laureate, you're billeted at Stockholm's Grand Hotel for the festivities. Ordinary people can stay at this palatial hostelry with a view of the Royal Palace, too, of course. I have, twice, and it's one of my favorite hotels, especially since a recent facelift that has left the guest rooms, already large and comfortable, looking particularly elegant. Mine had rich cherry woods, blue and gold tapestry upholstery, and five huge windows with a fabulous roofscape view. Instead of the usual hotel bathroom, it had more of a bath complex -- four separate little marble-lined rooms. Pretty good for a hotel that started, in 1874, with a total of two bathrooms, which at the time was one more than the Royal Palace had.

All this does not come cheap -- I paid about $200 a night -- but the price is modest compared to what you'd pay for comparable quarters in Paris or London. For reservations, call the hotel directly at 011-46-8-679-35-00, or book through The Leading Hotels of the World, at 800-223-6800.