BLACKBOOK THE CULTIVATED TRAVELLER ST PETERSBURG A STAR IS REBORN The Venice of the North opens up to sophisticated visitors. Julian Allason reports For the first time in a century Peter the Great’s capital has shrugged off its reputation for poor service and lengthy queues, offering travellers hospitality worthy of the city’s sublime architecture and art treasures. Last autumn’s gala opening of the Four Seasons Lion Palace (fourseasons.com/ stpetersburg), unimprovably sited in an 1820 princely seat next to St Isaac’s Cathedral, raised hotel-keeping to new levels of sophistication in a marbled setting that has played host to tsars. Now competitors are being spurred to excel themselves, adopting a contemporary approach to imperial grandeur. At the Grand Hotel Europe (grandhoteleurope. com), off Nevsky Prospekt, a presidential wing of six ultra-luxe suites, including one stretching to 300sq m, has been completed. There is also talk about a face-lift at the Hotel Astoria ( roccofortehotels.com), where past patrons include Lenin, Rasputin and the Rolling Stones and whose sumptuous Tsar Suite, furnished with original candelabra, tables and chairs dating from 1912, is among the largest in the city. Meanwhile a gastronomic battle has broken out, triggered by the Lion Palace’s opening of the Sintoho restaurant, swiftly adopted by the glitzki fashion set. It has revealed a surprising passion among Russians for contemporary Asian food, likely to escalate with the impending launch in December at the Grand Hotel Europe of Aziza, created by Japanese design stars Super Potato, responsible for London’s Zuma and Roka restaurants. April’s unveiling of the fourlevel Luceo Spa at the Lion Palace is also supercharging standards – and stirring up competition across the city. St Petersburg’s main attraction remains its unsurpassed art collections. In the Soviet era, French Impressionist paintings were consigned to the State Hermitage Museum’s attics (hermitagemuseum.org), dismissed as degenerate art. Today works, by Renoir and Monet join the Raphael and Titians in the main collection of the former Winter Palace. Museum authorities are now working with the Lion Palace to arrange private after-hours visits for hotel guests. The same is true of the new Fabergé Museum (faberge.com) and National Library of Russia (nlr. ru/eng), to which the Grand Hotel Europe can facilitate privileged access. The greatest excitement is in modern and contemporary art, with an explosion of private galleries inspired by the success of Erarta, the largest private art museum in Russia (erartagalleries. com). For both locals and visitors, this has provided an opportunity to view Russian painting and sculpture suppressed during the Soviet era, including the recent display of Dmitry Shorin’s erotically charged sculptures of jet-powered angels. Now showing until mid-October is Engineers of the Arts, displaying the work of the Leningrad Underground Epoch of the 1980s and 1990s. Mariinsky II, the stateof-the-art performance hall adjacent to the 19th-century Mariinsky Theatre (mariinsky. ru), opened last year after more than a decade of development and hosted its much feted production of Madame Butterfly this summer, among many others out of its vast repertoire. Further ahead, billionaire art collector Roman Abramovich is leading redevelopment of Novaya Gollandiya Island, a former navy base, as a self-contained cultural destination with its own museum. There can be little doubt that St Petersburg’s time has come – again. ILLUSTRATION LAUREN CROW 50 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM CONTACT CENTURION SERVICE FOR BOOKINGS
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