Tivoli Gardens

Wally’s Mother always told us, “The first thing you must do when you go to Copenhagen is go to Tivoli.” So on our first evening in Copenhagen, we went to Tivoli. “We” being Wally, me, and two middle-aged stamp collectors. Right in the middle of downtown Copenhagen, the Tivoli Gardens were Walt Disney’s inspiration for Disneyland.

As a child, my brothers and I went to Saturday matinees at the Tivoli, the neighborhood movie theater on Magnolia Avenue on Fort Worth’s South Side. At that time I had no idea where the name came from. I doubt that Wally’s Mother knew why the Danes chose that name for their delightful amusement park.

The original Tivoli is a hilltop village in Italy, about 40 miles from Rome, where the Italians have gone to escape the summer heat for two thousand years. At the bottom of the hill the Emperor Hadrian vacationed in an enormous villa, the largest royal palace ever built, now a ruin spread over many acres.

At the top of the hill, just off the village’s main square, tourists enter a gate between 20-foot high marble columns and through the tall, heavy doors of a palace, built during the Renaissance by a Cardinal d’Este. From a great hall with faded murals on the walls, tourists step out onto a wide balcony (another traveler and I had tea there one afternoon in 2005) and look down over the marble balustrade at one of the most beautiful gardens in the World.

The Tivoli gardens in Italy are famous for their fountains. The Danish version is totally different. Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens are built around a lake. Lights from various pavilions on the shoreline are dazzling in themselves, plus being reflected in the water.

On that first night we ate supper in a restaurant specializing in open-faced Danish sandwiches. We had beef, shrimp, cheese (all Danish specialties), and some others I don’t remember, all with fancy garnishes. What I remember vividly was tiny Baltic shrimp mixed with a light mayonnaise, delicious and like no other I’ve ever tasted. It was not Miracle Whip.

Then we went to see a ballet on the Peacock Stage, a small outdoor theater. A fairy tale danced under the stars by the Royal Danish Ballet Corps. What could be more magical?

We climaxed the evening at the Conditerie (don’t know how to spell that). It is a pastry-shop, where you select your order at a counter, and a waiter in black tie brings your choice to a table on an open-air terrace. I had Danish layer cake, a four-layer white cake with whipped cream filling and topping. Like all the food at Tivoli, it was delicious and expensive.

In all my travels, this was one of the most delightful evenings, although tired from our early flight from Iceland, we did not listen to classical music in the concert hall or ride the ferriswheel in the carnival area. And we did not wait to see the fireworks.

I heard that every night at Tivoli ends with fireworks. While we were having our sandwiches at the restaurant, I asked the waitress, “Where are the fireworks?”

“Beside the sea,” she said.

“The sea?” I asked. Although Denmark is surrounded by seas, Copenhagen is separated from Sweden by a narrow channel called the Kattagutt. (Again, my computer’s spell checker never heard of it.)

“The sea,” she repeated and made a wide circle with her hands. “We have a sea here in the garden.”

She meant the lake. Warning: you and a foreigner may both be speaking English, but it is not necessarily the same language.