Stockholm City Museum in Stockholm, Uppland, Sweden | Museum

Welcome to Stockholm City Museum, Stockholm, Sweden. Currently at the Stockholm City Museum you can see a colourful exhibition that challenges our perceptions of the 18th Century and let the voices of the past tell the stories of the City. Diaries, tickets and letters reveals that Stockholmers were just as inclined to cherish their thoughts, the gossips and pleasurable adventures like today’s web loggers. It’s about the dirt in the gully, the filth in the brothels, the restless luxury life of the Royals and the daily round of ordinary people.

Carl Michael Bellman has become a symbol of the 18th Century Stockholm. But who was he really, and what does he represent today, apart from being a drunken poet or a genius? Perhaps both. Obviously, there were a great number of taverns available in the City to choose from. In fact, 700! Less famous is Johan Sevenbom, an artist who was overshadowed by the brilliant Sergel. Just like in Sevenbom’s paintings, there is nothing that spoils the atmosphere of a City represented in harmony.

Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotta was the bon vivant and passionate diary writer who by the age of 17 emigrated from Germany to marry Duke Karl, later Karl XIII. For us today, her diaries have become treasures including gossips about the Royals. Her writings were probably just a way to kill time between balls and card games.

Altogether they present their personal perspective of Stockholm - a City which after the war of Karl XIII lost its status as the capital of Sweden and became just a provincial city far from the centre of European politics. Was the 18th Century an age of enlightenment and aesthetics, or is it just our delusion?  Come and discover for yourself at Stockholm City Museum