Stockholm

The Swedish capital where Descartes went to tutor Queen Christina and died within four months of arriving.

Christina wanted philosophy lessons at five in the morning, in a cold library, in the worst part of a Swedish winter. Descartes had spent his life rising late and working in bed. He caught pneumonia within weeks and was dead by February 1650. His body was buried in Stockholm and later moved to Paris, though the skull went missing along the way and turned up in a Swedish auction more than a century afterward.