Stand on Palace Square and Read the Building
Approach from Palace Square and the Winter Palace resolves out of the city's grey light as a long green-and-white façade, two levels of Ionic columns running its length, statues and vases along the parapet above. This is the fourth palace on the site and the one the Romanovs used as their official residence from 1732 until 1917. Bartolomeo Rastrelli gave it its Elizabethan Baroque form; after a fire in 1837 destroyed nearly all the interiors, it was rebuilt within a year with the exterior left unchanged, so what you face today is Rastrelli's shell around interiors remade in a spread of 19th-century tastes. The building is long and low by palace standards, and local planning rules have kept the city centre from rising above it. Three archways open through the façade into an interior courtyard.
It is worth your time for two reasons at once. It was the seat of imperial government — the place from which the tsars ruled — and it is now the most important building of the Hermitage Museum complex, so a single visit gives you both the theatre of the Romanov court and one of the world's great art collections. The palace and its precincts were declared part of the State Hermitage Museum in 1917.
Walk the State Rooms, Then Step Into 1917
The State Rooms form one of the most popular sections of the Hermitage and are the heart of a visit. Look for the enfilade of state rooms overlooking the Neva, created by Giacomo Quarenghi and Ivan Starov in the 1780s and 1790s, and the 1812 War Gallery added by Carlo Rossi under Nicholas I. The interiors were continually revised across the 18th and 19th centuries, and restoration from the 1940s onward has steadily returned imperial splendour to many rooms.
- Follow the Neva-side rooms for the view out over the river as much as for the decoration.
- Seek out the 1812 War Gallery — a long, portrait-lined hall with its own place in Russian memory.
- Remember the palace's political life as you move through: the first Duma was opened here in 1906, and in 1914 Nicholas II returned to accept the salute of troops departing for the front.
- Outside, on Palace Square, you are standing where the Bloody Sunday massacre took place in 1905, when troops fired on workers marching in peaceful protest toward the palace.
- The storming of the palace in October 1917, after it had briefly served as the seat of the Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky, became a defining image of the revolution — fixed in the wider culture by Sergei Eisenstein's 1928 film October.
The scale is part of the experience: the palace holds some 1,500 rooms and more than 100 staircases, and the Hermitage collections fill the precincts around it. You will not see it all, and you should not try.
Make a Day of It, Not an Hour
Give the Winter Palace and the Hermitage the better part of a day. The building is enormous and the collections are deep, so decide before you go in whether you are there for the palace or for the art — and let that shape your route. Even if you don't care about art, wandering the palace itself is extremely rewarding; if you do, the State Rooms are essential viewing and a natural starting point.
- Arrive early in the day. The palace is the city's most important attraction, and the crowds build as the morning goes on.
- Come in the warmer months if you want to combine the interiors with the embankment outside — the palace faces the south bank of the Neva, and the walk along the water is part of the visit.
- Winter has its own logic: the palace was built as a winter residence, and the city's historic centre is at its quietest then.
- Don't miss the exterior on your way out. Walk the length of the principal façade and look up at the parapet; the original stone statues and vases were replaced with lighter metal substitutes between 1892 and 1902.
The nearest metro is Admiralteyskaya, about a five-minute walk away.
What Else Is Within Reach
You are standing at the centre of the historic centre, which is UNESCO world heritage, and much of the best of Saint Petersburg is a short walk or a single metro ride from the palace doors.
- The Hermitage Museum — the palace is its most important building, and the collections continue through the surrounding precincts.
- The Admiralty and the Bronze Horseman, both right by Palace Square.
- The Church on the Spilled Blood, on the Griboedov Canal near the Mikhailovsky Garden, filled with mosaics.
- Nevsky Prospekt, the city's main grand avenue, with the historic Gostiny Dvor mall and the Kazan Cathedral.
- The Square of the Arts and the Russian Museum, just off Nevsky Prospekt.
- Saint Isaac's Cathedral, with its balcony views.
- The Mariinsky Theatre, one of the world's most beautiful performance venues — worth seeing even without a ticket.
- Across the Neva, the Peter and Paul Fortress on the Petrograd Side, and the Strelka on Vasilievsky Island with its Rostral Columns.
Start with a map of the historic centre and put the palace at the middle of it. Book your Hermitage ticket, set aside a full day, and plan your walks outward from Palace Square — the city arranges itself around this building, and once you have stood in front of it, the rest of Saint Petersburg begins to make sense.