The Catherine Palace

The Catherine Palace is a Rococo palace in Tsarskoye Selo (Pushkin), Russia, 30 kilometers south of St. Petersburg. It was the Russian tsars' summer palace. The Palace is a World Heritage Site as part of the Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments.

The Catherine Palace is named after Catherine I, Peter the Great's wife who ruled Russia for two years following his death. The Catherine Palace, which began as a modest two-story palace commissioned by Peter for Catherine in 1717, owes its incredible splendor to their daughter, Empress Elizabeth, who chose Tsarskoe Selo as her main summer house. Starting in 1743, four different architects reconstructed the structure before Bartholomeo Rastrelli, Chief Architect of the Imperial Court, was commissioned to entirely remodel the palace on a scale to match Versailles.

The resulting palace, completed in 1756, measures nearly 1km in circumference and features elaborately decorated blue-and-white facades with gilded atlantes, caryatids, and pilasters designed by German sculptor Johann Franz Dunker, who also collaborated with Rastrelli on the palace's original interiors. It took nearly 100kg of gold to decorate the palace exteriors during Elizabeth's reign, an excess that Catherine the Great deplored when she discovered the public and private expenditures that had been wasted on the structure.

The interiors of the Catherine Palace are equally impressive. The so-called Golden Enfilade of staterooms, created by Rastrelli, is especially well-known and serves as the focal point of the palace tour. The most notable interiors are those in the so-called Cameron Rooms, suites designed by Catherine the Great's favorite architect, Charles Cameron, during her reign. His passion for classical symmetry and color is evident in the attractive Green Dining Room, which was initially designed for Catherine's son Paul, and the delightful Blue Drawing Room, which features blue-and-white painted silk wallpaper and a stunning painted ceiling. The Chinese Blue Drawing Room, which is showier but equally attractive, also has exquisite painted-silk wallpaper with a detailed Chinese scene

Location: Garden St, 7, Sankt-Peterburg, Russia