Pavlovsk is 30 km from Saint Petersburg (Russia), just to the south of Tsarskoye Selo. It is home to Pavlovsk Palace, one of the most splendid residences of the Russian imperial family. It is part of the World Heritage Site Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments.

The Pavlovsk palace is probably the best preserved of Russian imperial residences outside the capital.

The Pavlovsk palace-museum gives a good idea of the development of classicism in Russian architecture at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Its uniqueness can be seen in the harmonious synthesis of architecture and the sculptures and paintings that comprise the interior décor – often the only ones of their kind.

The museum’s rooms include architectural masterpieces such as the Italian and Greek rooms, the Carpet Study, the War and Peace rooms, the Throne Hall, the Painting Gallery, the Torch-Study, and the Rossi Library. The suite of rooms created in the early nineteenth century for Empress Maria Fyodorovna by Giacomo Quarenghi and Andrei Voronikhin are particularly stunning.

The museum’s collections include 32,000 exhibits. The largest collection is that of decorative and applied art, which includes unique Russian and Western European porcelain pieces and furniture. There is a significant collection of canvases by Western European seventeenth- and eighteenth-century artists, fabrics, bronze-works, elephant bones, and precious stones.

The 600-hectare park is famed as one of the finest landscaped parks in Europe. Its charm lies in the convincing symmetry of the natural landscape and the architectural constructions – pavilions, staircases, bridges, locks, and garden sculptures. The palace’s collection of antique sculpture is the second best in Russia, after the Hermitage.