Few Russian palaces have a story as heavy as the Alexander Palace in Pushkin, the town that grew around the imperial estate of Tsarskoye Selo, south of St Petersburg. Catherine the Great had it built for her grandson Alexander, the future Alexander I, by the Italian architect Giacomo Quarenghi in the 1790s, a restrained neoclassical building with a long colonnade facing the park. Its fame, though, comes from the last family to live in it. Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra preferred it to the grand Winter Palace, and they raised their five children here until the revolution of 1917, when the family was placed under house arrest in the palace before being sent east.
The Alexander Park around it is a landscape garden of ponds, shady paths and small follies, laid out in the English manner, and in autumn it is a good place for a walk, with the leaves turning and the light low. The much larger Catherine Palace, a short way off, is the better-known attraction, with its blue and gold façade and the reconstructed Amber Room, whose original panels disappeared in the Second World War. The town was renamed after the poet Pushkin, who studied at the Lyceum here as a boy, and the school building still stands beside the Catherine Palace.
The ride in from St Petersburg is an easy run of about twenty-five kilometres south, mostly on busy urban roads and highways, so it is not a place for twisting bends. What you enjoy is the flatness and the northern light, which in June and early July, during the white nights, lasts almost until dawn. Expect heavy traffic on the main roads on weekends, wet cobbles in town after rain and short riding seasons: the weather is reliable only from May to September.
Pushkin has about ninety thousand inhabitants, so fuel stations, cafés and shops are plentiful. Parking near the palaces can be crowded, and a bike is easier to place than a car. Check the opening hours and the ticket arrangements for the palace before you set out, since visiting rules have changed from time to time, and bring a rain jacket whatever the forecast says.