Catherine Palace – St. Petersburg, Russia
(Image copyrighted to damian entwistle. All rights reserved.)
About the location (from Wiki):
The Catherine Palace is the Rococo summer residence of the Russian tsars, located in the town of Tsarskoye Selo (Pushkin), 25 km south-east of St. Petersburg, Russia. The residence originated in 1717, when Catherine I of Russia engaged the German architect Johann-Friedrich Braunstein to construct a summer palace for her pleasure. In 1733, Empress Anna commissioned Mikhail Zemtsov and Andrei Kvasov to expand the Catherine Palace. Empress Elizabeth, however, found her mother’s residence outdated and incommodious and in May 1752 asked her court architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli to demolish the old structure and replace it with a much grander edifice in a flamboyant Rococo style. Construction lasted for four years and on 30 July 1756 the architect presented the brand-new 325-meter-long palace to the Empress, her dazed courtiers and stupefied foreign ambassadors. Although Stasov’s and Cameron’s Neoclassical interiors are superb manifestations of the late 18th-century and early 19th-century taste, the palace is best known for Rastrelli’s grand suit of formal rooms known as the Golden Enfilade. It starts at the spacious airy ballroom, the “Grand Hall” or the “Hall of Lights”, with a spectacular painted ceiling, and comprises numerous distinctively decorated smaller rooms, including the reproduced Amber Room.
Movies shot at this location:
VizhaamalE Irukka Mudiyumaa song from Student No. 1 (Tamil)




