Saint Petersburg was founded on 27 May 1703 and was the imperial capital for 206 years, so its history is layered street by street: Peter's fortress, Catherine's palaces, the 1917 revolution and the siege of Leningrad all within a few Neva bends.
The city's birthplace: Peter the Great laid the first bastion on Zayachy (Hare) Island on 27 May 1703. The Trubetskoy Bastion prison held Dostoevsky, Gorky and Trotsky. Grounds free; combined ticket covers cathedral, prison and museum, roughly 750₽.
Domenico Trezzini's 1712–1733 cathedral holds the tombs of nearly every Romanov from Peter I to Nicholas II, whose remains were reburied here on 17 July 1998. Its 122.5m gilded spire was the tallest structure in Russia until 2012.
The oldest building in Saint Petersburg: a three-room pine log cabin built by soldiers in three days in May 1703 and lived in by the tsar while the city rose around him. It sits inside a protective brick shell erected in 1844.
Founded 1710 on the spot Peter believed Alexander Nevsky beat the Swedes in 1240. The Tikhvin Cemetery holds Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Glinka; the Trinity Cathedral dates to 1790.
The protected cruiser that fired the blank shot at 21:40 on 25 October 1917 signalling the storming of the Winter Palace. Launched 1900, veteran of Tsushima 1905, now a branch of the Central Naval Museum moored at Petrogradskaya Embankment.
Opened 9 May 1975 on Ploshchad Pobedy, a 48m obelisk with bronze figures of soldiers, workers and grieving mothers, and a broken-ring hall below ground marking the 872-day blockade of 1941–1944.
Mass graves of roughly 470,000 civilians and 50,000 soldiers who died in the siege, in 186 long earth mounds marked only by year. The Motherland statue of 1960 stands at the end of the avenue above Olga Bergholz's inscription.
Solyanoy Pereulok 9, opened 1946, shut in 1949 during the Leningrad Affair and reopened 1989. Holds ration bread of 125 grams a day, Tanya Savicheva-era diaries, the metronome broadcast and a Salyut-era diorama of the Road of Life.
Kuznechny Pereulok 5/2, the flat where Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov and died on 28 January 1881. The study clock is stopped at 8:36pm, his hour of death; rooms restored from his wife Anna's memoirs.
Moika 94, home of Russia's richest family. In the cellar on the night of 16–17 December 1916 Felix Yusupov poisoned and shot Rasputin; the basement rooms are staged with wax figures and the private rococo theatre upstairs still hosts concerts.
Peter's 1704 island fortress guarding the approach to the capital, site of the 1921 sailors' uprising crushed by Trotsky. The Naval Cathedral of St Nicholas (1913) has marble panels naming every sailor killed since 1696.
Rastrelli's blue-and-white convent cathedral (1748–1835) beside the Smolny Institute, a girls' school that became Lenin's headquarters in October 1917 and where Sergei Kirov was assassinated on 1 December 1934, triggering the Great Purge.