of the panserbjørne palace and the centre of the ice bear government, Iorek Byrnison lives there, Svalbard takes its name from a Norwegian archipelago in our world. Bolvangar In Lyra's world, the far north location of the research facility where the Magisterium conducts experiments with intercision, a process which involves severing the link between a human and their dæmon, children are kidnapped and brought to Bolvangar for this to happen. The name Bolvangar means 'Fields of Evil'. In Old Norse, "bǫl" means bale or evil and "vangar" is a plural word meaning fields or meadows. Cittàgazze Cittàgazze, sometimes abbreviated to Ci'gazze (), meaning "City of the Magpies" in Italian, is a fictional city within a parallel universe which is reached through a "window-between-worlds" created by Lord Asriel at the climax of the first volume of the trilogy, Northern Lights. It is in Cittàgazze that the two central characters, Lyra and Will, first meet in The Subtle Knife. The first reference to the city appears earlier, as 'the city in the sky', the city visible in the Aurora borealis, an occurrence which, according to the novel, thins the barrier between the universe in which Northern Lights takes place and the universe of Cittàgazze. Lord Boreal describes it as having previously been a crossroads between all the worlds. Cittàgazze is a seaside town, reminiscent of those near the Mediterranean Sea, which seems to have Italian roots. Its main features are quaint restaurants, parasols hung over circular tables beneath trailing plants, wide cobbled roads, and ancient architecture. However, it also has electric lights, refrigerators and department stores, thus, this world appears to be similar to ours in many respects while inferior in others such as medicine and transport. Its most significant feature is the Torre degli Angeli (Tower of the Angels in Italian), in which the Subtle Knife is first encountered. The city is plagued by ghostly beings called Spectres. Spectres are invisible to pre-adolescents, but once individuals are old enough to see them, the Spectres eat away their dæmons, leaving them zombie-like and lifeless. Hence, the city is entirely devoid of adults, and populated only by small gangs of children. Spectres cluster around children approaching adolescence and consume them as soon as they come of age. The multitude of Spectres in the world of Cittàgazze is due to the constant use of the Subtle Knife in its vicinity. The knife can create