Stand on Palace Square at midday and you are in the staging area of two centuries of Russian history. The great curved yellow General Staff building wraps one side, the green and white Winter Palace fills another, and in the middle rises a granite column topped by an angel. The palace was designed in the 1750s by Bartolomeo Rastrelli for Empress Elizabeth, in a flamboyant Baroque that makes every other palace in Europe look restrained, and it was from here that the Russian emperors ruled until 1917. Today it holds the Hermitage, one of the world's biggest art museums, whose collection began with Catherine the Great's purchases and now fills several buildings along the Neva.
The historic centre of Saint Petersburg, listed by UNESCO in 1990, is a planned city, and that is its charm. Streets are straight, with long perspectives ending in spires, and canals curve through it in careful arcs. Nevsky Prospect runs in a dead straight line from the Admiralty with its golden needle, past the Kazan Cathedral with its curved colonnade, to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. On the other side of the Neva stands the Peter and Paul Fortress, where the emperors are buried, and the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood, a many-coloured fantasy of onion domes built where Alexander II was assassinated in 1881.
The city has a tragic chapter, too. During the siege of Leningrad, from September 1941 to January 1944, around nine hundred days, hundreds of thousands of residents died, mostly of starvation, while the city refused to surrender. Memorials and cemeteries recall it.
Riding in the centre is not recommended: traffic is heavy, trams rule the roads and parking is almost impossible. Leave the bike somewhere secure and walk. Fuel and services are everywhere in the wider city, which has over five million inhabitants. Be aware that travel to Russia by foreign motorists is currently heavily restricted, and the situation changes quickly.
Visit in the white nights of June if you like light, or in the cold clarity of winter for fewer crowds. In every season, take comfortable shoes, because distances here are bigger than they look. In the old cafes, order a pastry called pyshka, a sugared doughnut, and tea from a samovar.