"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."