10 The Oresund Strait is a bottleneck, four kilometers at its narrowest point, separating the North Sea and the Baltic Sea (to give you an idea, the Strait of Hormuz is thirty). The Danes built Kronborg Castle there, a fortress to control the passage and charge tolls to commercial vessels. At the end of the 16th century, the fortress was transformed into a magnificent Renaissance castle, of an opulence that made it famous throughout Europe.The castle is in the city of Helsingor, today better known in the rest of the world as Elsinore, an English name that Shakespeare used when, a few years after the great reformation, he set Hamlet there. I was able to visit it this Sunday and rarely have I had the impression of a place where literature corresponds so exactly with what you see: corridors, guard posts, Nordic coldness and conspiracies, even the great hall where Hamlet could have had the death of his father performed. It doesn't matter that Shakespeare had never been there. To be or not to be is about that.

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