The overhead rail
Laureates' cards moving across the ceiling all day.
Hajotthu — CC BY 3.0 · Leon S.K. — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Bahnfrend — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Kevin Payravi — CC BY-SA 4.0
The Nobel Prize Museum occupies the old stock exchange building on **Stortorget**, the main square of Stockholm's old town — the same building in which the Swedish Academy meets and from which the Nobel Prize in Literature is announced each autumn. The museum is about the prize and about those who have won it since 1901: more than nine hundred people and organisations in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, peace and economics. The displays are personal objects donated by laureates — spectacles, notebooks, laboratory equipment, small things with stories attached. The design feature people remember: a **rail system suspended from the ceiling** on which laureates' cards travel slowly across the hall all day, so the whole museum is in motion. In the café, the chairs are **signed by laureates on their undersides** — the museum's tradition is that each visiting laureate signs one. Turn your chair over and see whose it is. **The ticket is not cheap**, and the space is relatively small — an hour is enough.
Laureates' cards moving across the ceiling all day.
Small things donated by laureates, each with a story.
Stortorget 2, Gamla Stan, Stockholm
Gamla Stan (The Old Town)Gamla Stan is the nucleus from which Stockholm grew in the thirteenth century: a1 minute walk
Storkyrkan CathedralStorkyrkan is the oldest church in central Stockholm, its origins reaching back 1 minute walk4.4
The Royal PalaceStockholm's Royal Palace is the official residence of Sweden's king and one of E2 minutes walk4.4
Marten Trotzigs GrandMarten Trotzigs Grand is Stockholm's narrowest street: just ninety centimetres a4 minutes walk4.5
Arvfurstens palatsThe Hereditary Prince's Palace stands on **Gustav Adolfs torg** in central Stock6 minutes walk4.5On **10 December** every year, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death. The five prizes — physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and economics — are presented at the **Stockholm Concert Hall** by the King of Sweden, followed by a banquet in **Stockholm City Hall** for about thirteen hundred guests. The **Peace Prize** is presented the same day but in **Oslo**, Norway, by a committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament — this was Nobel's own instruction in his will, and the reason has never been conclusively explained. Stockholm City Hall can be visited on a tour year-round.