Catherine' s Summer Palace

One of the lovely things about Russia is its countryside. Since so many people in Russia live in the cities in apartment buildings, the Russian countryside is not developed like it is here in the United States. On a drive outside of St. Petersburg you will see birch tree forests and farm land for miles. Our first stop is a place known in Russia as Tsarskoye Selo, or what we call Catherine's Summer Palace.

Although Catherine's Summer Palace is popularly associated with Catherine the Great, she actually regarded its "whipped cream" architecture as old-fashioned. The palace was actually built due to the efforts and funds of Empress Elizabeth and it was named after her mother Catherine. It is said that Elizabeth had the Palace rebuilt six times from the ground up to meet her expectations. Completed in the mid-1700s, and changed significantly by Catherine the Great, the interiors are Neoclassical, the exterior is a flamboyant Rococo style. The palace is best known for Rastrelli's grand suite of formal rooms known as the Golden Enfilade. It starts at the spacious airy ballroom, the "Grand Hall" or the "Hall of Lights", with a spectacular painted ceiling. The Golden Enfilade also contains and comprises numerous distinctively decorated smaller rooms, including the reproduced Amber Room. The most famous room of the palace, the Amber Room was dissembled and its contents allegedly moved to a safer location during World War II. What actually became of the amber work and porcelain is unknown. More than forty years later, in 1982, an order was given to begin the restoration of the room, which took over 20 years to complete.

Видео Catherine' s Summer Palace канала Musings on Art by Cathy Locke