L 6
et me say this about Villa Sisyfos: this house is not so much a house as it is a function or a vessel. There are places in the world that stand out from the dull mass of everything else. Places where history is so clearly present. Physical spaces where the layers of time have left such a distinct mark that each layer tells its own story. Stories that expand far beyond the walls and shrubbery that mark the physical boundaries where the house stands. These are places where things that feel so distant in time become imaginable: the feeling of walking out on a river that has frozen over, and beneath its icy cold surface you see glimpses of things past and feel their presence. All the people, their thoughts, fears, and hopes. Villa Sisyfos is such a place. Here you can sense traces of histories much greater than the grandeur of the façade, which in itself would be more fitting of a fin de siècle borough in some Central European capital. Embedded in these walls, you find the saga of modern Stockholm’s own birth and development, which mirrors the incredible transformation of Swedish society: from an ugly duckling into one of the world's wealthiest nations. It is also a history shared equally by the most unlikely of people. Here were summer school students, punch-drunk artists from the golden years of Scandinavian painting, and refugees from the merciless tides of the Second World War. All have passed through this house and left their marks, claiming this space inch by inch, memory by memory. This is not a house; this is the sum of the stories of those mentioned in this book. Theirs are the stories we found and fell in love with, a story that now becomes yours.
