Saint Petersburg City Guide: Winter Palace -Travel & Discover

The magnificent green, white and gold Winter Palace is superbly situated on the banks of the Neva River. This 200-meter-long building in the Russian Baroque style, once the official residence of the Tsars, is the biggest and most lavishly decorated palace in the city. Catherine the Great later added the small and large hermitages onto the palace as a sanctuary for herself and her private art collection. The southern façade overlooking the square has a formal grandeur. Here the architect pierced the building with three arches to create a grand entrance into the courtyard and accentuated it with the vertical elements of paired columns. Developing upon one and the same architectural motif, architect Francesco Rastrelli gave each of the four façades of the palace a different structural rhythm. The palace consists of four large blocks stretching between the square and the embankment. Together they contain the main state apartments and more than a thousand halls and rooms. The magnificent Baroque imprint of the palace's original appearance has survived to the present day and has gone down in history as one of Rastrelli's masterpieces. The façades are each embellished by a two-tiered colonnade. Forming a complex rhythm of verticals, the columns soar upwards, a motion which embraces the numerous statues and vases on the roof. The abundance of molded decoration, fanciful cornices and window architraves, mascarons, cartouches, rocaille, and a variety of pediments creates an extremely rich play of light and shadow that endows the building with its magnificent appearance.