Top Things to Do in St. Petersburg

St. Petersburg was built to astonish. It has never stopped trying. Peter the Great raised this city from Baltic marshland in 1703 through imperial decree and mass conscription. The resulting metropolis still carries the smell of its own ambitions. Pastel-coloured palace facades in ochre and sage and cream. Canals laced through the historic core like silver thread. Granite embankments polished by three centuries of foot traffic. The air off the Neva in early morning is cool and mineral, faintly briny from the Gulf of Finland. On clear days the gilded spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress catches the low northern sun and throws a blade of light across the water that can stop a person mid-stride. Orientation comes quickly if you approach St. Petersburg as a collection of islands rather than a conventional city grid. Vasilyevsky Island to the west holds the oldest academic and merchant institutions. The central historic core clusters around Nevsky Prospekt and the Moika and Fontanka canals. The southern districts stretch toward the victory monuments beyond Moskovsky Prospekt. The metro is fast and efficient. Its Stalinist stations are worth riding for their own sake: columns of veined marble, mosaics the size of tennis courts, escalators that descend so steeply you feel the pressure change in your ears. What St. Petersburg does that no other Russian city quite manages is collapse historical time. A single afternoon walk can move from a Petrine-era natural history museum to a Soviet-era victory monument to a rooftop gallery showing work by painters who graduated last year. Egyptian sphinxes and an imperial triumphal column occupy the same embankment in between. First-time visitors often arrive expecting a frozen imperial museum piece. They leave having encountered something considerably stranger and more alive.