Painting ‘Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo’. Series ‘Views of St Petersburg and Moscow’ by Alexey Maksimovich Gornostaev, produced as a gift to Queen Victoria on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of her reign.
The Alexander Palace (Russian: Александровский дворец) is a former imperial residence at Tsarskoye Selo, on a plateau around 30 minutes by train from St Petersburg. It is known as the favourite residence of the last Russian Emperor, Nicholas II, and his family and their initial place of imprisonment after the revolution that overthrew the Romanov dynasty in early 1917. The Alexander Palace is situated in the Alexander Park, not far from the larger Catherine Palace. Today it is undergoing renovation as a museum housing relics of the former imperial dynasty. read more…
The Catherine Palace was the Rococo summer residence of the Russian tsars, located in the town of Tsarskoye Selo (Pushkin), 25 km south-east of St. Petersburg, Russia. The residence originated in 1717, when Catherine I of Russia engaged the German architect Johann-Friedrich Braunstein to construct a summer palace for her pleasure. In 1733, Empress Anna commissioned Mikhail Zemtsov and Andrei Kvasov to expand the Catherine Palace. Empress Elizabeth, however, found her mother’s residence outdated and incommodious and in May 1752 asked her court architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli to demolish the old structure and replace it with a much grander edifice in a flamboyant Rococo style. Construction lasted for four years and on 30 July 1756 the architect presented the brand-new 325-meter-long palace to the Empress, her dazed courtiers and stupefied foreign ambassadors. read more…
Sankt Petersburg is probably the most unusual, “un-Russian” city of the country. This is because the origin history and historical and urban development of the “Venice of the North”. Sankt Petersburg has a little more than 300 years of history full of ups and downs. Visitors who are strolling around the streets soon have the feeling to visit one of the great European cities of the 19 century rather than a Russian city. The city at the river Neva has, compared to other capitols in the world, the most extensive historic downtown and can be described without exaggeration as an open-air museum of architecture. read more…