City Center: Palace Square and the Hermitage

The best place to get acquainted with St. Petersburg is the elegant Dvortsovaya Ploshchad, or Palace Square. Its scale alone can hardly fail to impress—the square's great Winter Palace was constructed to clearly out-Versailles Versailles—and within the palace is the best reason to come to St. Petersburg, the Hermitage. Renowned as one of the world's leading picture galleries, it also served as a residence of the Russian Imperial family, and provides a setting of unparalleled opulence for its dazzling collections, which include some of the greatest old master paintings in the world. As a relief from all this impressive glitz and grandeur, tucked away in the shadows of the great Imperial complex is the moving apartment museum of Alexander Pushkin, that most Russian of writers, set in a neighborhood that still enchantingly conjures up early-19th-century Russia.