The Venice of the North — Hermitage, White Nights, and palaces on the Neva
St. Petersburg is Russia's most beautiful city — a baroque and neoclassical metropolis built by Peter the Great at the edge of the Baltic, on a delta of islands and canals. The Hermitage Museum (housed in the Winter Palace) is one of the world's great art collections: 3 million objects, 350 rooms, Rembrandts and Matisses and Scythian gold. The city's summer White Nights — when the sun barely sets for weeks — produce a continuous euphoric festival atmosphere that draws visitors from across Russia and Europe. The Mariinsky Theatre stages Tchaikovsky ballets in gilded halls. It is an intensely l…
St. Petersburg was founded in 1703 by Peter the Great on Swedish-conquered marshland as a 'window on Europe' — the capital of a new, Westernised Russia. Built largely by conscripted serf labour, the city cost enormous human lives but produced one of the world's great planned cities. It served as the capital of the Russian Empire for over 200 years, witnessing the Decembrist Revolt (1825), the assassination of Alexander II (1881), and ultimately the February and October Revolutions of 1917 that ended imperial Russia. Renamed Petrograd in 1914 and Leningrad in 1924, the city endured the catastr…