Odense

Hans Christian Andersen was born here on 2 April 1805, into real poverty. His father was a shoemaker who died when the boy was eleven; his mother took in washing. The family shared a single room, and a small yellow house on the corner of Hans Jensens Stræde is remembered as his birthplace. He was an odd child — tall, awkward, with a big singing voice and a habit of performing puppet plays for anyone who would stop. At fourteen he took the coach to Copenhagen with a bundle of clothes and almost no money, to become famous. It took years of charity and humiliation before it worked. When he finally wrote “The Ugly Duckling”, about a strange, unloved bird that turns out to be a swan, nobody had to ask who it was about.

The city is far older than its famous son. On 10 July 1086 King Canute IV — sometimes called the last Viking king — fled into a church here from farmers enraged by his taxes and his planned invasion of England, and was killed at the altar. The Pope made him a saint, pilgrims came, and their offerings paid for the brick cathedral that still carries his name. Behind the altar you can go down and look at his bones, laid out in a glass case beside his brother's, which is a startling thing to meet on a weekend away. A second Odense boy, Carl Nielsen, born just south of town in 1865, grew up to write the symphonies Danes treat as their national music.

The modern city leans into all this without becoming a theme park. In 2021 the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma folded a new Andersen museum around the birthplace — two thirds of it underground, a drift of circular rooms and gardens inspired by “The Tinderbox”, the tale in which a hollow tree opens onto a world below. Each late August the H.C. Andersen Festivals fill the streets with hundreds of performances. The rest of the year Odense is simply a very easy city to walk or cycle: the Odense Å slides through Munke Mose park under the willows, and a short ride south is Den Fynske Landsby, a whole village of old Funen farmhouses moved here and rebuilt.