Under the Gostiny arcades and the glass roof of the Passage

⏱ 45 min🚶 1.2 km🍽 1📍 4 stops

🐢 A little — under 3 km

The galleries of Gostiny Dvor and the Passage where the rain can't reach, Shuvalov Palace on the Fontanka and lunch at a restaurant with a homey interior on Liteyny.

🏛 History and architecture🎨 Art☔️ If it rains⏱ An hour or so

🗺 Open in Yandex Maps

1
🏛 Gostiny Dvor
Невский пр., 35
A huge 18th-century shopping complex with yellow arcade galleries along Nevsky.
Walk along the Nevsky side under the arches — the rain doesn't reach here. The metro entrance is built into the building, so it's easy to start from here.
📖 More about the placeCollapse
© Tatiusa · CC BY-SA 4.0
- Gostiny Dvor was conceived as the largest trading building in the Russian Empire; Rastrelli's design was approved in 1757.
- It was built by Vallin de la Mothe, who kept Rastrelli's layout but dressed the building in early Neoclassical forms.
- In the 1840s Gostiny Dvor was one of the first buildings in the city to get gas lighting.
- People came not only to shop: they arranged dates and "accidental" matchmaking meetings here, and Krylov loved to stroll through.
- In 1966 the department store was visited by around 300,000 shoppers a day.
- Since 3 November 1967 the vestibule of Gostiny Dvor metro station has been built into the building.
🚶 on foot
2
🏛 Passage
Невский пр., 48
A 19th-century department store with a glass roof over a long arcade of shops from Nevsky Prospekt to Italyanskaya Street.
Across Nevsky. Walk the gallery under the glass roof all the way to Italyanskaya and back.
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© Ivonna Nowicka · CC BY-SA 4.0
© GAlexandrova · CC BY-SA 4.0
- Passage opened on 9 May 1848; it was built by architect Rudolf Zhelyazevich for Count Essen-Stenbock-Fermor.
- From the 1860s Turgenev, Nekrasov, Dostoevsky and Chernyshevsky performed in Passage's concert hall.
- In 1879 Crédit Lyonnais set up here — the only foreign bank then allowed to operate in Russia.
- In 1904–1906 Vera Komissarzhevskaya's theatre worked in Passage's hall.
- In 1961 the first department store for women in the USSR opened in Passage.
- Passage is mentioned in the title of Dostoevsky's story “The Crocodile: An Extraordinary Event, or the Passage in the Passage”.
🚶 on foot
3
🖼 Fabergé Museum (Shuvalov Palace)
наб. Фонтанки, 21
🎟 ticket
A mansion on the Fontanka with restored halls displaying Easter eggs, jewellery and silver.
6 minutes to the Fontanka. We look at the mansion from outside; the Fabergé eggs are separate and take another 1.5 hours, ticket office until 20:15.
📖 More about the placeCollapse
© Ninara from Helsinki, Finland · CC BY 2.0
© Ninara from Helsinki, Finland · CC BY 2.0
© Guy Fawkes · CC BY-SA 2.0
- The museum is built on Malcolm Forbes's collection: in 2004 Viktor Vekselberg bought it as a single lot just before the auction.
- The museum opened on 19 November 2013 and became Russia's first private museum of national scale.
- The palace restoration took seven years and cost roughly 1.2 billion rubles, with no state money.
- The collection has over 4,000 items, including works by Fabergé's rivals Sazikov, Ovchinnikov and Khlebnikov.
- In 1928 the building, then the House of the Press, hosted the famous OBERIU evening “Three Left Hours”.
- During the First World War the palace's last owner, Countess Betsy Shuvalova, set up a field hospital here.
🚶 on foot
4
🍽 Ili Restaurant on Liteyny
Литейный пр., 53
▮▮▯▯▯
Over the bridge and along Liteyny — 4 minutes. Lunch: on weekdays a set menu, at weekends shashlik and eggplant salad.
🍴 A chain restaurant with a homely interior and a fixed price on most dishes — a convenient lunch right at the entrance to Fountain House. What to order: a weekday set lunch, a salad with fried aubergines, shashlik.