5 Beautiful Places to Visit in St Petersburg
St. Petersburg
has a true wealth of attractions and experiences to offer travellers, from
spectacular Imperial palaces to quirky and absorbing museums, from boat trips
along the city's majestic rivers and canals to walks in the footsteps of
St. Petersburg's literary and artistic greats. In
fact, there's more than enough to see and do in St. Petersburg to keep
visitors entertained for weeks or even months.
One
of the biggest challenges for independent travellers is to work out what they
will actually have time to fit in to their itinerary, particularly as
St. Petersburg is one of Europe's largest cities, with the historical
centre alone covering several square kilometres and some of the most famous
attractions located far out in the suburbs. To help you get the most out of
your time in St. Petersburg, our travel writers have drawn on their own
expertise and years of feedback from travellers to compile this Top 20 list of
attractions and experiences.
The Hermitage (The Winter Palace)
The Hermitage
Museum now spans several
sites, but for most visitors it is the main collection in the Winter
Palace that is an essential component of any St. Petersburg
itinerary. Here you'll find not only centuries of European fine
art and a rich collection of Greek and Roman antiquities, but also
the astonishingly opulent 18th and 19th century state rooms of
Russia's imperial family.
Since the summer of 2014, much of
the Hermitage's renowned collection of impressionist and post-impressionist
art (in terms of artistic quality, undoubtedly the highpoint of the
collection) has been transferred across Palace Square to the General Staff
Building, so if your main reason for visiting the Hermitage is to see the art,
then you have to consider making time for the second location, possibly with a
break for refreshments between the two.
The Mariinsky Theatre
Renowned for the impeccable discipline and devotion
to tradition of its ballet company, and blessed in Valery Gergiev with one of
contemporary classical music's most exciting and exacting conductors, as well
as international stars of ballet and opera including Ulyana Lopatkina, Diana
Vishneva and Anna Netrebko, the Mariinsky Theatre is a world-class venue for
ballet, opera and orchestral music.
Recent years have seen the Mariinsky spread beyond
its historic home, the wedding-cake late-19th century opera house on
Teatralnaya Ploshchad ("Theatre Square"), with the addition in 2006
of the Mariinsky Concert Hall, and in 2013 the long-awaited opening of the
second opera and ballet stage, Mariinsky II. While most visitors will want to
enjoy the rich atmosphere and ornate interiors of the main theatre, both new
venues are beautifully designed inside, with state-of-the-art acoustics and
stage technology, making them well worth exploring for music enthusiasts.
It took Peter the Great over a decade and a few
false starts before he found the right site for his summer residence. Modelled
partly on Versailles, but with many features that reflected Peter's specific
tastes and interests, the park was expanded under Peter's daughter, Empress
Elizabeth, to greatly surpass its French antecedent in scope and grandeur.
While the Grand Palace at Peterhof is less spectacular than the Catherine
Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, Peterhof excels in the diversity and range of its
attractions, from the charming baroque buildings of the Petrine era to the
extraordinary gilded extravagance of the Grand Cascade to the catalog of
gardening styles encompassed in the Upper and Lower Parks to the ever-growing
number of museums housed in the various buildings on the estate.
Completed in 1858, St. Isaac's took over forty
years to build and decorate. Its strictly European Empire-style facades and
colonnades are made unique by the employment of red Karelian granite, while the
interiors also meld Orthodox tradition with Catholic influence and
extraordinary extravagance in the choice of materials. Different types of
semiprecious stone from all over Russia form the interior walls and columns,
while an abundance of original art and sculpture goes only a little way to
filling the vast hall of the cathedral, designed to accommodate 14 000 standing
worshipers. As well as visiting the Cathedral interiors, travelers can buy an
extra ticket to climb the 300 steps up to the colonnade. From here, you can
enjoy some of the best views of St. Petersburg available.
The place where the city of St. Petersburg
began, the Peter and Paul Fortress never actually saw military action, but has
fulfilled a variety of functions over its three-century history, from burial
place for nearly all of the Romanov Emperors and Empresses to notorious
political prison to the site of key experiments in the development of Soviet
rocket technology. All of these aspects of the fortresses history are
celebrated in diverse exhibitions across various buildings, and it is the
ramshackle charms of these various museums and collections as much as the
grandeur of the spectacular Ss. Petersburg and Paul Cathedral that make the
fortress an essential visitor attraction.
Stay at St Petersburg with XcelTrip to receive a cool 15% cashback on
all your bookings and make memories that last a lifetime.
Comments
Post a Comment