The art of the Uffizi palace and the Florence academy, together with that of the minor museums of Florence, with explanatory and appreciative comment on ... and their history and significance

Early on the afternoon of December 4 my sister joined Dad and me in New York for our Scandinavian Airlines flight. Our plans were to stop over for two nights in Copenhagen to see friends Betty and I had made when we lived there in the early 1950s. But after crossing the Atlantic, the pilots discovered that Copenhagen was fogged in. So we found ourselves in Stockholm two days earlier than expected. Bypassing customs as if we were a diplomatic delegation, we were whisked by limousine to the storied Grand Hotel, built in 1874, across from the Royal Palace, onto which looked my room, among the finest in the house. I soon joined my sister and Dad for a herring-heavy smorgasbord, where we lunched with Kai Falkman, the young Swedish diplomat who would accompany us to all our Nobel week engagements. After a much-needed nap, we all supped together in the rathskeller of a restaurant in the Old Town, whose buildings date back to the fifteenth century. There Kai told us that the youngest of the four Swedish princesses, Christina, wanted to spend a year at an American university, possibly Harvard, following graduation from her Swedish high school ...»