Pavlovsk Palace

"Built and named for the , Pavlovsk began as a convenient way of getting the then Grand Duke out of his mother's sight. was anything but fond of her only legitimate son, and getting him out from underfoot was well worth the price of a palace, so, in 1777, she gave him a large estate 17 miles south of and three miles from the royal resort of , and four years later building on the house was begun. As it turned out, however, the person who supervised every detail of the construction and the decoration was Paul's wife, the Grand Duchess, and later Empress, . This civilized and artistically inclined German-Alsatian princess knew just what she was doing. The house was finished in 1796 and modified somewhat after a fire in 1803; as it stood at the time of her death in 1828, it was probably the finest (and certainly the most complete) palace in Europe."

"Built during the era of the and the , the palace contains many motifs from antiquity, beginning with the Egyptian Vestibule (Yegipetskiy vestibyul) on the first floor, which is lined with pharaonic statues and zodiac medallions. From here, visitors are ushered upstairs to the second floor State Rooms via the main staircase, designed by with martial motifs to pander to Paul's pretensions. The northern parade of rooms reflect his martial obsessions, the southern ones the more domesticated tastes of Maria Fyodorovna. The striking thing about the rooms, though, is their relatively human scale — you could just about imagine living there — unlike those of the Great Palaces of and . At the top of the stairs, to the right, the domed Italian Hall (Italyanskiy zal) rises into the palace's central . Its decor, intended by to evoke a , is uniformly , with rich helpings of trompe l'oeil and s and s shaped like s."