Our tour for today is the Hermitage followed by the Summer/Catherine Palace. The people that took this tour yesterday did the inverse and after complaining about the sardine experience of the Hermitage of an afternoon someone has worked some magic and got our group into the Hermitage an hour and a half before opening the this morning. We didn't exactly have the place to ourselves, but we got up close and personal with everything we were interested in. Our to...

"This is the castle of emperor Paul the Ist, he was so anxious about assassination plots that he was the first Romanov to build himself a castle rather than a palace so that he could be better protected. Forty nights after he moved into his new castle he was assassinated by his own court." That seems to be the underlying theme for this city - kill who you need to in order to gain power, just build a church to ensure St Peter still lets you in. The result is a ci...