null
Page 54Page 55
Page 54
TRAVEL/TOURS ADVERTORIAL54 NADFAS REVIEW / AUTUMN 2016 www.nadfas.org.ukAbove: Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood in St PetersburgThe great and the goodSt Petersburg has a proud history of nuturing innovative artists, fi nds Jessica Holland, and the creativity of a new generation is ensuring its future will become as culturally rich as its pastForeign in its own fatherlandÓ was the way that the novelist Nikolai Gogol described his home city of St Petersburg: a young city in an old country, facing out towards Finland and the rest of Europe, resolutely cosmopolitan, intellectual and forward-thinking. Built in the early years of the 18th century by Peter the Great as a seaport, a ‘window to the West’ and a centre for science and culture, St Petersburg was always intended to be a harbour, as the Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky has put it, both literally and metaphorically. “There is no other place in Russia where thoughts depart so willingly from reality,” he wrote in an essay about the city. “It is with the emergence of St Petersburg that Russian literature came into existence.”Moscow, Russia’s capital, may be three times as big and three times as old, but it is St Petersburg, with its latticework of canals and gorgeous European architecture, which inspired artists such as Pushkin, Roerich, Pavlova and FabergéIt’s also home to one of the world’s most spectacular repositories for art: the awe-inspiring Hermitage Museum, which has been described as the as the Louvre and the Palace of Versailles rolled into one. Three million treasures make up its permanent collection, from pharaonic sarcophagi and Stone Age relics to work by Leonardo, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Titian, Cézanne, Picasso, van Gogh and Monet, all housed in the impossibly elegant Winter Palace of the Romanov dynasty. Its baroque facade gleams white, turquoise and gold under a fl uttering Russian fl ag, while horses