Catherine Palace, Tsarskoye Selo

The Catherine Palace is the Russian Baroque at its most exuberant: a facade some 300 metres long, painted sky blue, lined with snow-white columns and pilasters, and crowned with gilded ornament on which almost 100 kg of gold was spent. It stands at Tsarskoye Selo, the imperial country estate south of St Petersburg, which Peter the Great gave to his wife, the future Catherine I, in 1710. Her modest stone palace of 1723, designed by Johann Friedrich Braunstein, had sixteen rooms. Their daughter, Empress Elizabeth, wanted something on an altogether different scale, and after successive enlargements by Zemtsov, Kvasov and Chevakinsky she handed the project in 1751 to Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who by 1756 had turned it into one of the most theatrical residences in Europe.

Rastrelli's interiors are laid out as an enfilade of state rooms, and the Great Hall is its climax: about 1,000 square metres of parquet, mirrors and gilded carving, lit in the evening by 696 lamps on about a dozen chandeliers set against the mirrors, so that the room seems to dissolve into light. Catherine the Great later brought in the Scottish architect Charles Cameron and others to refit parts of the palace in a cooler Neoclassical taste, and the contrast between the two eras — Elizabeth's gold and Catherine's restrained elegance — is part of the pleasure of walking through.

The palace's most famous room came from Prussia. The Amber Room, begun in 1701 by the sculptor Andreas Schlüter and the craftsman Gottfried Wolfram, was presented to Peter the Great by King Frederick William I in 1716 to seal an alliance against Sweden, and was later installed here and enlarged to more than 55 square metres, with over six tonnes of amber. German troops dismantled it in 36 hours in October 1941 and shipped it to Königsberg, where it vanished at the end of the war. The palace itself was deliberately wrecked during the retreat. Restoration began in 1957, guided by photographs and records made before the war, and a full recreation of the Amber Room, begun in 1979, was unveiled in 2003 after 24 years of work. Around the palace lies the Catherine Park, with its lake, bridges, obelisks and the Cameron Gallery. Tsarskoye Selo is part of the UNESCO World Heritage site of historic St Petersburg and its surroundings.

Getting there

The palace stands in the town of Pushkin (the historic Tsarskoye Selo), roughly 25–30 km south of central St Petersburg. Trains run from the city's Vitebsky station to Tsarskoye Selo station on Russia's oldest railway line, opened in the 1830s. Pulkovo Airport (LED) is about 12 km away.