Catherine Palace

The Catherine Palace in Tsarskoye Selo. Virtual guide.

World masterpieces, the richest collections, the reborn World Wonder – Amber Room, the Golden Enfilade of the world-famous Catherine Palace and the fantastic views of the surrounding parks now start life on your Android.

Take a virtual tour around Tsarskoye Selo - the former ceremonial residence and the place of living of the Russian Emperors, a national treasure of the present Russia and a part of the world's cultural heritage.

The magnificent palaces with the surrounding parks. Best of the best that the humanity can create up to the beginning of the 20th century. Interiors, sculpture, paintings, furniture, porcelains, gifts, ancient marbles, enfilades, landscaped parks with amazing pavilions and so on, and little more.

This unique virtual tour is based on 3D panoramas with the addition power of hundreds of superb quality images and navigation maps.

We hope you pay attention for the good usability.

Enjoy the museum under your fingertips!

No additional or hidden fees.

The compositional centre of the ensemble is the Great Tsarskoye Selo or Catherine Palace – a splendid example of the Russian Baroque.

The display of the Catherine Palace (known until 1910 as the Great Palace of Tsarskoye Selo) museum covers the almost 300-year history of this outstanding edifice and presents the work of architects involved in its construction and decoration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and also with the achievements of the restorers who returned the palace to life after the Second World War. Of the 58 halls destroyed during the war years, 32 have been recreated.

In 1717, while St Petersburg was being created on the banks of the Neva, the architect Johann Friedrich Braunstein started supervising the construction of the first masonry royal residence at Tsarskoye Selo that has gone down in history as “the stone chambers” of Catherine I. During the reign of Empress Elizabeth (the daughter of Peter the Great and Catherine I) in late 1742 or early 1743 it was decided to enlarge the building. From late 1748 until 1756 the construction of the Tsarskoye Selo residence was directed by Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli (1700–1771), the chief architect of the imperial court. On 10 May 1752 Empress Elizabeth signed a decree on the complete reconstruction of the old building and on 30 July 1756 Rastrelli was already presenting his new creation to his crowned mistress and foreign ambassadors.

The next stage in the decoration of the state rooms and living quarters came in the 1770s. The new mistress of the residence, Empress Catherine II, was fascinated with the art of the Ancient World and wanted to have her apartments finished in keeping with current tastes. She entrusted the task to the Scottish architect Charles Cameron (1743–1812), an expert on ancient architecture. The interiors that he created in the Zubov Wing and the North Part of the Palace are marked by refined beauty, austere decoration and especially exquisite finishing. In 1817, on the orders of Emperor Alexander I, the architect Vasily Stasov (1769–1848) created the State Study and a few adjoining rooms that are finished in a commons style – all these rooms were devoted to extolling the brilliant victories that the Russian army won against Napoleon in 1812 and afterwards.

The last note in the symphony of palace state rooms was struck by the new Main Staircase created in 1860–63 by Ippolito Monighetti (1819–1878) in the “Second Rococo” style.