Oslo

For most of its life this city answered to another name. In 1624 a fire raged for three days and burned medieval Oslo to the ground. Denmark's King Christian IV — who ruled Norway too, for the two countries were joined — simply moved the survivors closer to Akershus castle, laid out neat brick streets safe from flame, and named the new town Christiania after himself. Norwegians called it that for three hundred years, and only in 1925 did the city quietly take back its old Norse name, Oslo.

Independence gave the place its grandeur. When Norway broke from Denmark in 1814 and, after a century tied to Sweden, became fully its own country in 1905, Christiania became a true capital: it built a royal palace, a parliament, a university, and the museums where a nation short on castles could gather its own story. Into this restless, provincial capital came Edvard Munch, a lonely, brilliant painter who turned private dread into the most famous scream in art — a figure clutching its face on a blood-orange bridge, painted in 1893 and now the pride of the city's galleries.

Modern Oslo wears its wealth lightly and points it at the water. Norway's North Sea oil made the country rich, and the capital spent some of that fortune on a white marble opera house you climb like a hillside, its roof sloping straight into the fjord. Ferries thread out to wooded islands, floating saunas steam beside the quays, and the forest — the Marka — begins where the tram lines end. Each 17 May the whole city fills with children in flags and folk costume for Constitution Day, less a military parade than a national street party.