Roald Amundsen

📍Uranienborg, Roald Amundsens vei 192, 1420 Svartskog, Norway

“I was born in Borge, near Fredrikstad, into a family of shipowners and sea captains, and when I was a few months old we moved to Christiania, now Oslo, where I grew up on Uranienborgveien. As a boy I read the accounts of the British explorer John Franklin and decided I would be a polar explorer. I trained for it secretly: I skied long distances in the hills and slept with my bedroom window open in the depths of winter to harden myself. My mother wanted me to be a doctor; after she died, I left medical studies for the sea. In 1908, after sailing the Northwest Passage, I bought a house beside the Bunnefjord at Svartskog, south of the city, and named it Uranienborg, after the street of my childhood and the famous observatory of the astronomer Tycho Brahe. It became my home and my base for twenty years. The outbuilding served as a storehouse for expedition equipment, I tested the hut later used at Framheim in the garden, and the Fram was made ready on the fjord below. From Uranienborg I planned the expedition that reached the South Pole in December 1911, the voyage through the Northeast Passage, and the first flight over the North Pole in the airship Norge in 1926. When I faced bankruptcy in 1924, two loyal friends bought the house and let me stay. In 1928 I left home to join the search for the lost airship Italia. My friends later gave Uranienborg to the Norwegian state, and since 1934 it has been a museum, kept much as I left it, with my furniture, my books and my polar mementoes.”

Sources: mia.no amundsen.mia.no amundsen.mia.no visitnorway.com Wikipedia: Roald Amundsen