📍Munkemøllestræde 3, 5000 Odense, Denmark
1807 – 1819“From the age of two until I was fourteen, home was a little yellow half-timbered house on Munkemøllestræde, in one of the poorest quarters of Odense. Three families shared it, and ours had a single room that served as kitchen, bedroom and my father's cobbler's workshop. My father was a shoemaker who loved books: in the evenings he read me The Arabian Nights and the plays of Holberg, and he built me a puppet theatre for which I sewed costumes and wrote dramas. My mother washed other people's linen in the river and took me with her to the old asylum where she worked, and its strange inmates stayed with me for life. Behind the house was a scrap of garden with flowers and herbs, and from our window I could watch the life of the street and the river. My father died when I was eleven, and at fourteen I set off alone for Copenhagen, determined to be famous, and people laughed at the gangly boy from Odense. Like my ugly duckling, I found my place in the end. The house is now part of the H.C. Andersen museum.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today